


Along for the Ride

by JustCallMeEmrys



Series: Along for the Ride [1]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels, The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Ezra is a stubborn nerd basically, Fed up with metahumans!Ezra, Gen, He's taking none of Ezra's lone wolf shit, Joe West is Best Dad, Just lemme have this one, Made Basic it's own language because I like making languages and also felt like it, Season 1 Flash, Season 2 SW????, Stranded!Ezra, Strange crossover but Ezra needs to be trapped on Earth okay, inconsistent updating probably because I am trash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-20 21:52:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 44,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10671492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustCallMeEmrys/pseuds/JustCallMeEmrys
Summary: For millennia, the Force in the Milky Way Galaxy has been weak; nonexistent. One explosion brings it back, strengthening it and warping it around the select few, giving them powers that others can only dream of. But this perversion of the Force has a price. To bring itself back into balance, it reaches out, searching the galaxies beyond for something strong enough to even out the reaction. It finds it, drifting in space after a botched raid, lost and left to die alone. Perhaps it was fortuitous that they found one another, or perhaps it was fate. Perhaps they can help one another. But Ezra does not care about fate, fortune, or helping the Force. All he cares about is that he is trapped on some backwater, primitive planet, with a dominant species that is so pitiful, they cannot even figure out how to leave their star system. He only cares about getting home, to the family that desperately searches for him, and to the budding war that will be lost without him.





	1. "'Get in the escape pod,' they said. 'It'll be FINE,' they said. THIS IS NOT FINE." Or, the One Where Ezra Hates Everything

"Let's go home." He ducked his head on reflex when something exploded too close to him, rocking his pod. "I want to go home right now!"

_"We're working on it!"_

Some part of machinery that he had no hope identifying started to wail in alarm near his left ear.

"Work on it better!"

* * *

" _We see your pod. Hang on to something, kid, this is gonna be a quick mag-and-jump."_

He laughed and found the first thing solid enough to hold on to that he didn't think might short out and electrocute him. His shoulder already hurt enough because of the _one_ Stormtrooper that had good aim.

He looked out the front window and paled. 

"Hera, behind you!"

* * *

" _We can't get to you, kid! There's too many TIEs!"_

He chewed on his lip and turned to his pod's controls. He could do this. He could  _totally_ do this. He had gotten a few lessons in piloting  _The Ghost_. He had been using speeder bikes since he was seven. He had figured out how to operate a Walker on the fly, which had a stupidly steep learning curve. A simple pod couldn't be too difficult, right?

"I'll try and fly closer to you guys. Be ready to grab me the second I'm close enough."

The TIE Fighters were being destroyed left and right, but there were still too many around for his comfort. He hoped that none of them would notice the defenseless escape pod puttering past.

* * *

The Force was churning around him, and he honestly couldn't tell if it was his panic that was causing it, or something else entirely. 

He slammed his palms against the window of his pod, screaming.

There were too many TIE Fighters. Too many.

The emergency light--the only thing still functioning--bathed the capsule in a sickly red glow that was too easy to compare to too many horrid things that he didn't want to think about. Like blood, or a dying star, or the Inquisitor's lightsaber as it spun towards his face, inches away from cutting his head off, which led him right back to _blood_. Oh, look, he was thinking about it anyway. Stupid brain. Do something useful. Like panic.

"KANAN!" he roared. Yes, good. Perfect. Just like that.

His comm link was lost somewhere in the pod. It had stopped working anyway; a problem not originating from his end. Screaming and panicking was doing nothing. It was probably a better idea to stop. He couldn't feel the breeze coming through the air vent next to his head anymore.

"KANAN!"

* * *

The air was thin, the emergency light dim and flickering. He leaned heavily against the window, cheek pressed against the freezing glass. 

It was too hot.

He knocked feebly against the glass, a rasping whisper of a name dying in his throat. 

He couldn't see the Star Destroyer anymore. Not even a speck of reflected starlight. 

The Force churned around him; wrapping around the pod and his limbs, reaching deep within him, latching on to his very soul and tugging it away.

The stars vanished, flickering and shifting, reappearing in new clusters and constellations.

He knocked against the glass.

"Kanan..."

* * *

The pod shook. It smelled like smoke and ash and burning ozone. Air rushed back into the capsule and into his lungs; unfamiliar air that tasted like dirt and rust and fresh-cut grass. Somewhere not far from him, lightning flared, crackled, and crashed. The Force warped and rippled. His vision cleared.

He wished it hadn't.

"Oh what the fu-"

His pod slammed into the bay, wrapped in fire, and he knew no more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So a prologue, obviously. I've got the first four chapters where stuff actually happens written out already. I'll post them so long as there's any demand for this story. I've still got my Dirk Gently fic, "Close to the Sun" to worry about (shameless plug lol), along with college and work stuff. I know this is a weird crossover to make, but honestly, I think it fits pretty well, and I've already gotten, like, seven pages on a Word document of plot info, so this is happening, people.
> 
> There's not much to go off of, but lemme know what y'all think so far. Make predictions over who you think Ezra will meet first and bond with first, if you want. I dunno. Lemme know people care about this I guess? Thank.


	2. "Being a cop is great until it's not." Or, the One Where Joe Just Wants to Go Home

 Joe West had seen a lot of things in his time in the Central City Police Department, both as a beat cop and as a detective. He had once seen a tweaker that was so strung out, he hadn't noticed that he had lost a few fingers to his broken garbage disposal until the cashier in the Walgreen's he had walked in to for an Arizona Tea had called an ambulance. He'd also been blessed with the opportunity to test his ability to keep his composure while watching two elderly men try to beat the living shit out of one another with half-eaten TV dinners when a fight had broken out in a retirement home.

After the particle accelerator at S.T.A.R. Labs had exploded, those things seemed mundane. His foster son could run faster than a commercial jet could fly, and was getting faster every day. He had gone up against men that could control the weather and who could transform into poisonous gas, men that could turn their skin to steel or absorb and redirect electricity. His definition of "normal" had been flipped on its head, and his every day was being filled more and more with the things that used to only exist in comic books.

Which was why he was so happy that he was down in the rotation, which meant that he would most likely not be getting any cases that would ultimately lead to another metahuman. That didn't mean that another detective wouldn't call him in to help with an odd case, but the possibility of him having to stretch his mind to redefine his basic knowledge of the world was greatly diminished, so long as he pretended not to notice Barry using his hand as a centrifuge to do in a few seconds what would normally take upwards of an hour.

As a matter of fact, Central City itself seemed to be down in the rotation of weird. The worst that had happened in the past week had been a bank robbery on the other side of the city where the robber had exploded a dye pack into his own eyes, and had been caught red-handed and purple-faced within two hours of him pulling what had turned out to be an airsoft gun with the orange muzzle tip snapped off.

Therefore, Joe was enjoying a bit of time off. He was able to sleep in his actual bed instead of at his desk, and was able to make his own dinner instead of ordering out or microwaving something in the break room.

It was the simple things, really.

Speaking of making dinner, because Central City had been so busy lately when it came to crime, Joe hadn't been home often enough to keep his kitchen fully stocked. Iris had done her best to refill the fridge and pantry with things that weren't expired, but she was young, and still considered a bowl of cereal and a banana with whipped cream an acceptable meal. Which meant that a stop at the grocery store was necessary, unless he wanted to eat frozen pizza for a third night in a row. Now, there were two grocery stores between the CCPD and Joe's house; at least, two that weren't ridiculously out of the way. Anybody with a brain that lived in a twenty mile radius knew that it was practically suicide to shop at the Kroger fifteen minutes east of the CCPD after five in the evening, as around that time, it was jam-packed with soccer moms and those that had also forgotten to restock their pantry before all that was left in it was rice and seven different types of balsamic vinaigrette. To be able to get in and out before the sun had set was a fool's hope.

Which left him with the small, mom-and-pop market ten minutes south and six minutes west of the police department. He actually favored the store, as he and the owner had had a rapport ever since he had helped out with a vandalizing situation back in his beat cop days. The owner still sometimes gave him a box of cookies or brownies from the on-sight bakery as a thank you.

The owner noticed Joe while he was  checking out, spotting him through the two-way mirror from his office. He came out with a warm smile on his face and a box of donuts in his hands. He was expecting him; the man always seemed to be able to guess when Joe had to shop. Joe idly wondered if the man kept a box of some sort of treat on his desk every day, throwing it out and replacing it with a new one whenever Joe didn't come in, just so that he'd be ready if he did show up.

"Detective!" the market's owner called, handing over the box of donuts without a word. Joe accepted them with a smile; he had learned that protesting the offering would get him nowhere a long time ago.

"Hello, Harry." Joe shook his hand. "How've you been?"

"Better," Harry responded, "but also worse."

Joe knew an invitation when he heard one. "There something going on?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "Not vandals again, is it?"

"No, that'd be cheaper to fix!" Harry laughed. "I'd prefer it. No, we've got ourselves someone with sticky fingers."

"Shoplifting?" That was surprising, actually. The neighborhood the market was in wasn't known for shoplifters. Shoplifting was more common at the larger stores that carried things that were deemed more worth the time and effort of trying to steal. "For how long?"

"I don't really know," Harry said with a shrug. "Only started noticing that the numbers weren't matching up a week or two ago. Some things aren't here that should be when we do inventory."

"Things like?"

"Oh, you know. Cans of food, some loaves of bread. Deodorant. That sort of thing."

Joe didn't need the mind of a cop to come up with a quick theory.

"This neighborhood get a higher homeless population recently?"

"Not that I know of, but you know how it is. They can be pretty good at hiding when they want to be."

That they could. It was almost unnerving how some homeless people were able to appear and disappear. Joe blamed it on their knack for blending in to the background, becoming just part of the scenery in the city. People could look right at them, and not see them. As a cop, Joe usually didn't have this problem, as he was trained to take in every detail in a second, including those that were usually invisible to others, but sometimes even he didn't notice that old, grizzled man sat on a collapsed box, huddled in a ratty coat that looked either too big or too small, never fitting quite right.

"Could be kids looking for an easy thrill." Joe shrugged. "Or could just be someone miscounting?" He didn't want to outright say that it could be an employee that was the one who was doing it--especially with the cashier standing right there--but Harry already knew what Joe was implying. 

"I doubt it's something on our end. No new employees, no sudden changes in their lives. I've never had any problems with my employees before." He pat the shoulder of the cashier, who gave a small smile, but otherwise silently kept to herself in the way that employees do when their boss is hovering behind them.

Joe looked to his groceries, sighing. Microwave dinner it was. "I'll run home to drop off my groceries, tell Iris I'll be late, and then I'll be back." Joe gathered up his groceries. "I always enjoyed a good stakeout." Harry smiled and Joe reflexively returned the expression, even if he wasn't quite feeling it.

Looked like he was working tonight after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to save this for next Wednesday and try to keep up a weekly update sort of deal, but since the prologue/chapter 1 was so short, I decided to be nice and post the first actual chapter early. Still short, I know, but if you like longer chapters, then you'll love the coming ones. Chapter 3 will (probably) be posted Wednesday, but I DO accept bribes to move that deadline up :))) Especially since Ezra actually gets his shit together and shows up in the next chapter.


	3. "At least he can't fly." Or, the One Where Joe is Outwitted by an English-Challenged Thief

Joe had no idea what he was doing.

That wasn't true, actually. He knew how to conduct a stakeout, official or not. He knew to have light snacks at the ready, to refrain from drinking anything other than those 5 Hour Energy things that Barry had gotten him hooked on, and how to keep a low profile. 

No, his issue was that he didn't entirely see the point to being on a stakeout in front of Harry's market. Sure, he had offered to keep an eye on the market and try to catch Harry's thief red-handed, but what the general public didn't seem to realize was that stakeouts weren't always successful, especially when the goal of said stakeout was to try and catch a thief that may or may not strike at one specific location on one specific night. And Joe wasn't even positive he was in the right spot. Who knew how skilled this thief was? If he was breaking in through any way other than the side door, then Joe would never see him.

He was pretty sure that the thief, whoever he--or she--was, would use the side door, though. It was mostly out of sight, hidden by the corner of the building and a lack of sufficient lighting, but still had a good enough view of the main road, along with a nice little side alley for a quick getaway if need be. If Harry's thief was as experienced as Joe suspected that he was, then his greatest chance of catching him would be to keep an eye on the side door.

Joe was getting incredibly bored, though, and wished that he had some sort of partner to keep him company. If he brought Eddie along then he'd have to report the thefts and conduct the stakeout as official police business--which Harry didn't yet want, in case it really was just some idiot kids--Barry was busy at S.T.A.R. Labs doing something that Joe was sure was more important than catching some petty thief, and there was no way in hell Joe was going to bring Iris along on a stakeout, simple as it was. Real stakeouts weren't like those on TV; there weren't any handy-dandy time skips or montages that could pass the time, and things didn't tend to happen quickly. Real stakeouts were a lot of sitting, waiting, and trying not to nod off.

Joe remembered hearing something a while ago from a coworker about how snipers would stay up for days at a time by imaging themselves with their target in some life-or-death situation. Joe was trying that with his target, however all he was succeeding in doing was giving himself a headache trying to imagine what shirt the thief would choose to wear in a violent situation and why. It wasn't helping him stay awake, either. He tried to rub the blurry fog from his eyes and huffed in frustration.

Muffled laughter chased away the fog faster than he could blink. A group of three teenagers was shuffling down the side alley, heading in the general direction of the side door. He looked at his watch, using the street light to read the shadowed face. Two in the morning. He highly doubted these kids were just out for a late-night stroll. Still, there was a chance that was the case, so he waited patiently, wide awake now that there was finally something going on. 

They headed straight for the side door, and Joe sighed. He was about to make some parents very disappointed in their children.

His fingers had barely even brushed the switch for his car's police lights before the side door was thrown open. However, to his surprise, the door wasn't opened from the outside, rather it was tossed open from the  _inside_. Standing in the doorway was someone dressed in an over-sized winter coat with a sweatshirt beneath, the hood of which was pulled up over the wearer's head.

Joe, unfortunately, didn't get a very good look at the person inside of Harry's market, for he--or she, really, as the person was rather small--suddenly rushed forwards, tackling the first teen that they could reach. They fell on the unfortunate, screaming teen, fists flying and hands clad in fingerless gloves reaching for the teen's face. 

The fallen teen apparently should have been in the market for better friends instead of the market for places to attempt to break in to, as the moment the new arrival tackled their friend, they split, completely ignoring their friend's call for help.

Joe's hand lingered on his car's switch panel, momentarily thrown for a loop. He, naturally, connected the dots quickly. The group of teens had been planning on breaking into Harry's market, but someone else had beaten them to it, and then had decided to beat them. Maybe it was a turf war type of deal, though Joe wasn't familiar with any gangs in the area for there to even be a spat over territory.

He was just beginning to come back to his senses and preparing to turn on his car's lights and sirens when the thief abruptly stopped his assault, pulling himself off of the unfortunate teen. The thief turned away from the kid, completely unconcerned of any sort of retaliation; the thief was right in his lack of worry, as a moment later, the teen was on his feet and fleeing as quickly as he could, face bloodied and nose crooked. 

The thief walked leisurely back into the market, returning a moment later with a backpack slung over one shoulder. He reached behind him and around the door, fiddling with something for a moment before pulling the door closed and waltzing off down the side alley.

In the grand scheme of things, the last five minutes hadn't been odd. But Joe hadn't shown up to his pro bono stakeout with his "grand scheme" glasses.

He was just happy that nobody started shooting lasers out of their eyes.

* * *

 He expected to follow the thief back to a house, or maybe an apartment complex. He seemed young enough to still be living with parents in any case.

Joe was  _not_  expecting to have to use every tailing tactic he had ever learned to try and discretely follow the kid out of the quaint neighborhood and into the more dirty and criminally inclined streets. At one point, Joe was positive that he had been made; the thief had turned around abruptly, and had stared directly at him. Joe had cursed both his luck and the red light that was preventing him from continuing on down the road, but then a group of drunk young men had stumbled by, and the thief's attention had followed them. The thief hadn't been looking at Joe at all.

Eventually, the thief had slipped through a split in a chain-link fence, disappearing down a side alley between a mechanic's garage and a grimy warehouse. Joe once again cursed his luck, this time at the thief choosing a path where his car couldn't follow, before quickly abandoning his car close enough to a street light to dissuade any criminals, but far enough away that him exiting the car wouldn't draw too much attention. He was a _professional_ , dammit. Forcing his much larger frame through the hole in the fence was a bit tougher to do, and Joe decided that he definitely needed to lay off of the eclairs at work. He supposed he could just lose his bulky jacket for a thinner one, but no, he liked his jacket, so he wasn't going to do that.

Beyond the fence was a narrow alleyway that led to an even narrower one around a bend, which ended in another fence, this one made of wooden planks that stretched high above his head.

And nothing else.

The thief was gone.

The person Joe was tailing getting away wasn't necessarily a new thing to him, but it was still quite annoying. He sighed.

"Why do you follow?"

He was embarrassed to admit that he jumped at the unexpected voice, and that his first assumption was that the thief was a metahuman with the power of invisibility. However, logic won out after a moment, and Joe looked up; high above him was a fire escape, and leaning against its rails was the thief, one hand propping up his head as if  _he_  was the one that had the right to be annoyed at the situation.

Joe had a lot he wanted to say, but first things first. 

"How in the hell did you get up there?" Because there were no dumpsters to jump on, and as far as he could tell, no handholds for the thief to scale the side of the building. The first part of the fire escape that he could have grabbed was at least eleven or twelve feet up. Joe supposed the thief could have just run at the wall and pushed off of it and hoped for the best, but Joe hadn't been that far behind him. Something like that would have made noise, or at least he assumed it would. But everything had been...silent.

Joe _really_  hoped he wasn't dealing with a metahuman.

"That important?" the thief asked.

"I suppose not." Even though yes, it kind of was. Joe's eyes narrowed. The voice was young, younger than he had first assumed the thief to be. It was definitely that of a male, and was deep enough to be from someone who had entered puberty, but it was still touched by youth, like his voice hadn't fully deepened yet. 

The thief was not speaking with anything close to perfect English. He had an accent that sounded European, but Joe couldn't quite place it. At first he thought it was Russian, but Joe had a friend from Russia, and his pronunciation wasn't close enough to the same for it to actually be that. Joe wasn't a linguist or anything similar, though, so the kid could have been from just about anywhere.

"Who are you?" the thief demanded. "You follow for much time. Why?"

Joe shook his head, focusing back on the matter at hand. "You were at Harry's Market. You were inside it."

The thief shrugged. "So?"

Joe sputtered. "You were robbing it!"

"Prove it."

"If I looked in your backpack, I'd find things you didn't pay for, wouldn't I?"

"Well, not let you look. So.  _Prove it_." Now Joe was pretty confident that the thief was a teen. Only a teenager could be so easily aggravating even with a language barrier, criminal or no. "Why do you care? You are not the owner." Joe unclipped his badge from his belt, and held it up. The thief took a moment, staring at the glimmering shield as if he did not recognize the significance, before he suddenly nodded and leaned away from the railing, but didn't yet leave. "Ah," he said simply.

Joe was impressed. Most thieves-- _especially_  teenage ones--took off running as soon as a badge was flashed. Though, the kid did have a reason to be confident in staying where he was; Joe knew there was no way he was getting up to that fire escape. The best he could do was try to get a glimpse of the kid's face and comb through mugshots of known teenage thieves later. The thief's hood was deep, though, and so far, Joe wasn't having any luck. He was also starting to suspect that the thief knew exactly what he was doing, keeping his head tilted at an angle so that a nearby streetlight kept his face cast in thicker shadows. He could barely even make out a chin within all of the inky darkness.

"Those other kids," Joe asked. "Were they from a rival gang?"

The thief rocked on his feet. "Rival gang?" he repeated, quietly and to himself. He repeated the words again, drawing them out in confusion. Joe could practically smell the smoke from the gears in his brain whirring away, struggling through translations, trying to decode Joe's words for himself, and then decode his own language for Joe in turn. "Oh. _Tipal banmoria_." He shook his head and pointed to himself. "No gang, no gang to rival."

"Then why did you assault them?"

"They...own? Money. No need to steal. Do to do. Steal against the law, yes?"

"Yes, it is. And how is them stealing any different to what you were doing?" The thief jerked away from the railing, as if the notion of him being a thief had never even occurred to him, and the truth was suddenly swinging a hammer into his face. He recovered quickly.

"Survive!" he snapped, slapping a palm against his chest. "Steal with no need...they are _makamobre_!"

"The law doesn't care what a thief's reason is," Joe said. That was an unfortunate fact of the American criminal justice system. It used to be different. The reasoning behind a crime was taken into account, but not anymore. The "get tough on crime" mentality didn't care if a criminal was stealing for the thrill or to feed his dying family, so Joe's personal view didn't really matter. He had a job to do.

"No law do," the thief said with a sigh.

"I checked the door after you left. You locked it."

"Keep _makamobre_ away," the thief said. He tapped his chest again. "Take only what need when need. Small comfort, but..." he shrugged before turning around and climbing the stairs to the next level. "Do not follow, _batska_. You are not good at it."

"Wait a minute!" Joe called after the thief, cursing the fact that he couldn't really do anything to stop or follow him. "I can't let you just leave! You still committed a crime!"

"Prove it!" the thief called over his shoulder before kicking himself over the edge of the roof and vanishing. 

Joe swore and returned to his car quickly, standing on his toes to try and see up to the roof and where the thief may have gone. The thief really was good at what he did though; he was already gone, vanishing like a ghost. Joe had no idea where he went, or how he went, considering the building he had climbed onto did not have any other rooftops close enough to get to. Joe huffed.

"What the hell does " _batska_ " mean?"

* * *

Turns out Google Translate was not helpful in the least. He had tried every combination of letters he could for the word the thief had called him, including a number of different types of accent marks, and he had even tried speaking the word directly into the translator, but the stupid thing was no help at all. Joe idly noted that it didn't actually matter what the thief had called him--whatever it was, he could almost guarantee that someone had called him something worse before--and that he was fixating on that one thing more out of frustration on how the stakeout had gone.

The stakeout he hadn't really wanted to do in the first place.

He almost wished he had a case to take his attention away from the petty thief.

_Almost._

Besides, he figured that if he found out what language the word belonged to, then he'd be able to start to form a suspect pool. The accent the thief had and the bits of the language that he had spoken were unique--not that he had much to compare it to, honestly--and could possibly have served as an identifier. He had gone off of way less on a case before. Every case had to start somewhere.

_'But this isn't actually a case,'_  Joe reminded himself. _'It's just some kid stealing stuff.'_

And that was the other thing that bothered Joe. The thief wasn't an adult, it was a  _kid_. And a kid who had admitted that he was stealing because he needed to to survive. Of course, the kid could have easily been lying, but he hadn't been backed into a corner. He had no reason to lie. He had no reason to _stay_  and _explain himself_. And he had spoken with a ferocity and conviction that Joe generally associated with the truth. Either the kid wasn't lying when he said he only did what he did to survive, or he was one damn good actor. And if the kid was stealing just to get by, that meant either he was living in an abusive situation, or he was homeless, neither of which Joe liked or favored over the other. Because that meant that the kid honestly had had no choice.

Joe preferred when criminal behavior was black and white instead of a spectrum of gray.

Every time he tried to look at the young thief as a criminal and nothing else, a part of him kept chiming in with very unhelpful comments. _'Think about it,'_ his brain would say.  _'That could have been Barry if you weren't there for him. That could have been Iris if you had been killed while on duty.'_

That was  _definitely_  not helping.

He was a cop. He wasn't supposed to be subjective. Which is why the fact that he was  _totally being subjective_  was pissing him off.

Joe pissed himself off further by going back to Harry's Market the next night for another stakeout, even though Harry said he had never been hit by the thief two nights in a row. And as Harry said, the thief didn't come back. Nor did he come back the night after, or the night after, or the number of nights following. Eventually, Joe was back up in the rotation again, and he couldn't spend his nights crammed inside his car for unofficial police business. Harry called him a few nights later to thank him for chasing off the thief, as he still hadn't returned, even though by then he would have a few times. Joe knew that Harry would have preferred he actually  _catch_  the thief, mostly so that Harry could give him a good talking to, but Harry was willing to take what he could get.

A few days after that, Joe forgot about the kid just about entirely.

Not that anybody could really blame him, considering the case he had landed. Someone was going around cutting the hands off of the homeless, leaving them to bleed out. It was a brutal case that took up just about all of Joe's attention. Barry had been working around the clock to at least identify what the murderer was using to cut through the victims' limbs, but so far, he hadn't had much luck. He had ruled out basically everything that had a straight blade, since the cuts were shaped oddly, though Barry knew it was something sharp and powerful enough to chop through a limb in one go. He and Joe were both hoping that it was some sort of custom-ordered weapon; if that was the case, finding the owner would go much faster.

Joe was at the fourth crime scene, taking a statement from a hysterical woman who claimed to have witnessed the attack, when someone bumped into him from behind and hurried off with barely a mumble of apology. Joe turned and caught a glimpse of blue and black before the person was gone. He turned his attention back to the witness to finish up the statement and then ducked under the police tape, intent on looking over the crime scene one more time before letting the coroner take the body away. However, as he was slipping his notebook back into his pocket, he felt the corner of a slip of what felt like well-worn paper brush against his thumb. He pulled it out with a frown, knowing that nothing should have been in that pocket.

It wasn't actually a piece of paper, but a napkin, folded over itself twice into a palm-sized square. He unfolded it, and scrawled across it in blue ink and loopy writing was something that made his eyebrows rise. 

_That woman saw nothing. She just wants to be involved in the drama. Meet me at the fire escape._

_\- Prove it_

Joe crumpled the napkin up and shoved it back into his pocket. He nodded to the coroner to let her know that he was all done with the crime scene, and waved Barry off when he approached with a concerned look on his face.

"Don't worry about it, Bar. Just going to head back to the station to start looking some of this over." He paused. "I'm going to swing by Delrosio's on the way back. You want anything?" Barry grinned and nodded enthusiastically--"Four, no,  _seven_  turkey clubs. No mayo!"--and Joe left without another word.

Finding the alleyway again was a bit of a chore. There was nothing around it to make it stand out, and it had been dark when he had first found it. By the time he got there, Joe was wondering if anybody would even still be there.

He was lucky. There was.

"You have nice handwriting," Joe commented idly, waving the crumpled napkin in the air. The hooded thief leaned forwards on the fire escape's railing. 

"No," he snorted. "Ask nice woman to write it."

"Why didn't you?"

The thief shrugged. "Did not have a pen."

Joe rolled his eyes. "Your English seems better."

"Practice," the thief said. He paused, growled to himself, and then said slowly with much emphasis, "I have been practicing," with all the drama of a student that had been told multiple times by a teacher to correct his grammar. 

"What is this about? What do you mean that woman didn't see anything? The details she gave of the killer were pretty specific."

"The details are wrong. She want attention. She not survive if she actually that close to... _kill-er_?" Joe nodded in encouragement, and the thief straightened, proud to have gotten the word right. "Details are wrong. Fake."

"Oh? And how do you know that?"

The thief pointed to himself. "Actually see killer."

Joe pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "Of course you did," he muttered to himself. He pulled out his notepad and flipped to a fresh page. "What did he or she look like?"

"He," the thief began, "is small." He held up a hand a bit above his head to demonstrate. "Dark hair, light skin. A...tear...in the skin, under the right eye."

Joe raised an eyebrow, pausing in his writing. "A tear? Do you mean a cut?" If the most recent victim fought back and some of the blood at the scene was from the killer...

"No, a tear. Old. A...hmm." The thief paused, appearing to think, before glancing down at his own left hand. He pulled off his glove and held his hand up to display his palm to Joe, pointing to a thick white line at the base of his thumb that curled up around the joint. " _Ouluza_. But on the face."

"Oh, a scar," Joe said, and the thief nodded emphatically. That was pretty helpful, actually. Scars and tattoos were always great things to have when trying to identify a suspect. "Anything else that could identify him?" The thief shook his head. "Okay. Thanks for the help." 

"You need it," the thief said with a shrug. Joe frowned at that. The light in alley was much brighter thanks to the daylight, so Joe was quite sure he saw the thief's lips peel back to bare his teeth in a grin. "You are bad at follow, but," he pat his chest again, "good."

"And why are you following me?"

"You are  _batska_. You follow broken laws. Killer break the law." 

Joe chuckled. "Trying your hand at solving crime instead of committing it?"

The thief scoffed. "No. Killer attack the no-homes. The no-powers. Attack the weak...not right." He sighed and rolled his shoulders in a half-shrug. "Need help. Can not make killer leave... _my-self_? Yes. He is..." He waved his hand in the air in a slashing motion. "Sharp."

"Sharp? What does that mean?"

"He cut hands with hands. The hands cut things, like...knifes?"

"Knives."

"Yes. He is warped."

"Oh, great," Joe huffed. The killer was a metahuman. That was both great and horrible. Great because that meant that maybe S.T.A.R. Labs could help, but horrible because that meant that there was a super-powered nutjob running around using their abilities to dice people up. "You haven't been getting too close to this guy, have you?" 

The thief shook his head. "Like rooftops," he said simply. He hummed to himself briefly. "You can catch the killer?" he asked.

"That  _is_  my job."

"'Job' not matter all the time. _Niv-Lothmao_  job is to catch  _Lothkri_ , but  _Lothkri_  can still escape." Joe didn't necessarily know what the thief was saying, but he thought he got the gist of it. "You can catch the killer?" the thief asked again, voice firm, and this time, Joe knew what the thief was looking for.

"Yes," he said. "I will catch him." Joe didn't know if he actually  _could_ , and he knew logically as a cop that making promises like this one could easily go horribly south, but at the nod he received from the thief and the lessening of tension around his shoulders, Joe knew that his promise had been the right call.

"Good." The thief turned, presumably to leave, but one word from Joe was all it took for him to pause. Joe really hadn't planned on speaking to the thief again after first meeting him, and had not thought of anything to say--there was so much that he  _could_  say, so much that he  _wanted_  to say--but now that he had the thief's full attention, he kind of just had to improvise.

"How old are you?" Joe decided on. It was a nice, simple question that, to the untrained, would seem like a harmless thing to ask. Nobody really needed to know that that helped Joe narrow down what he had to search for. The thief in turn cocked his head, and for a moment was silent. Then he shrugged. "You don't know?" Joe received another shrug. "Well, when's your birthday?" Another shrug. "Jesus, kid, how long have you been on the streets?" Another damning question cloaked in simplicity.

"Much time." And just like that, Joe knew that the kid really was homeless, and wasn't living in an abusive home. Of course, there was still the possibility that the thief was lying.

"You must have a pretty good setup, then," Joe said. "A nice, dry corner to call your own." He could just _feel_  the bemused look the thief was giving him.

"It is...good?" the thief said, shifting onto his left foot and crossed his arms over his chest. Joe mentally noted that.

"I hope you have food stocked there. You know, since you haven't been going to Harry's Market recently." 

The thief's grip on his forearms tightened. "Have enough," he said. "Not raid market  _batska-ra_  guard. Not stupid." He chuckled to himself at that, as if he had told some sort of joke, and his stance relaxed a bit. He turned again and moved towards the top of the fire escape. He had just vanished over the roof's ledge when Joe called out to him again, and the thief stuck his head back over the edge to peer at him. Joe held up his notepad. 

"Thanks," he said. 

The thief stared at him for a long moment, debating. And then he nodded, and said, _"Mai na Ashila prazast eke."_  And then the thief was gone, though Joe barely noticed, for as soon as the thief spoke that strange phrase, there was an odd...almost pressure in the air that Joe felt shift around him, wrapping around his arms and legs and hanging around his neck. It was heavy but also incredibly light, and wasn't altogether unpleasant, just odd and unfamiliar, like receiving a hug from a family member that hadn't been seen in years. It made him feel like he could challenge Barry to a race and win, but he also felt like he could out-catatonic a rock.

Joe idly added "May be a wizard well-versed in curses" to the growing list of the information he had managed to gather on the rather odd thief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ezra makes his official entrance! Poor boy is still working on his English. You didn't think I'd just plop him down in a different galaxy and not have a language barrier, did you? LOL nah fam I go hardcore. I've basically made my own Galactic Basic dictionary, along with the language laws, and a bit of the regional variant used on Lothal (which I call Lothali). Because I'm a nerd that likes making up languages. Let's see if any of you can figure out what he says when he speaks Basic.


	4. "You look like life punched you in the teeth." Or, the One Where Iris Adopts a Stray

Iris was having one hell of a day at work. 

She had been stuck with only a trainee during the morning rush who couldn't tell the espresso machine from an egg beater, the cash register's computer system had crashed twice because who the hell knew why, and Iris had been dragged into an argument with a customer that thought she knew more than she knew and was one of the "the customer art holier than thou" types. So one could safely say that she was in a foul mood come the lull in the rush after the nine-to-fivers had all retreated to their individual jobs.

Which was probably why, when she had left to take out the trash and noticed someone digging through their dumpster, she had nearly whipped the bag of garbage at the person and left it at that.

Throwing things was cathartic, but hitting people was even more so. She blamed this habit on her father teaching her to fight when she was younger.

However, right as Iris was winding up to either throw the trash bag near the person or to just yell in order to scare them off, the person swore under his or her breath, leaned back out of the dumpster, and kicked it in aggravation. Iris wasn't surprised at the person's disappointment; the dumpster had been emptied last night, so it probably only had papers in it from the office building that CC Jitters had to share dumpster space with.

No, what surprised Iris was that the homeless person was very clearly a young boy, probably barely into his teens. He was around her height, with tan skin that spoke to hours baking out in the sun without any sort of protection, and a remarkably sharp nose for one so young. On his left cheek were two rather prominent and nasty scars, looking part like they were from gashes and part from something packing a ridiculous amount of heat. His hair was long, probably not having seen a pair of scissors in at least a few months, and was so incredibly dark that at first Iris thought that it was black, but when he shifted back on his heels and the light from outside the alley hit it, she realized that it was actually a very dark shade of  _blue_. His eyes were blue, too, though they were the brightest and most brilliant blue that she had ever seen on a person. She would practically call them an electric blue, and she would never have thought that such a shade was physically possible for anything other than the wolves she had seen in a documentary on the Discovery Channel.

Iris knew that she was right when she had thought that he was homeless, too, because if digging through the trash wasn't enough of a hint, then his raggedy clothes that no mother would allow a child to leave the house in certainly was.

CC Jitters had rules about dealing with homeless people. They could be inside the building so long as they weren't loitering, but that was about it. Iris wasn't allowed to let them sleep in the alley behind the coffee shop, and if she caught any of them hanging around the dumpster, she was to chase them off. It was "bad for the company's image", or some bullshit like that. Those were the rules.

Iris had never liked those rules. So she was going to conveniently ignore them.

However, like  _hell_  she was going to let the kid eat out of the trash. So, as carefully and quietly as she could, she backed herself through the door and into Jitters, placed the bag of trash down, and made a beeline straight for the display case. She collected the most neutral foods she could think; a ham and cheese sandwich, an apple, two chocolate chip cookies, and two bottles of water. She wrapped it all up in a nice to-go box, told the trainee that she was going to be another minute, and then walked as quickly and as calmly as she could back to the back alley, hoping that the kid was still there.

Luck was on her side, for the kid had returned to digging through the dumpster, apparently clinging to the hope that something edible was hiding just a bit further down under the shredded papers and empty staple boxes. And that was when Iris was met with a dilemma. How was she supposed to get the food to the kid? Some homeless people were incredibly jumpy, and she didn't want to scare him off before she could pass the box over to him. She could always open with "Hi, I noticed you were hungry, would you like some food?" but she wasn't sure that that would go over very well, since she would still be sneaking up on him. She considered just tossing the box towards him and hoping for the best, but one, Iris wasn't sure the box would stay together, and like hell all of this nice clean food was going to get dirtied on the ground, even though she was sure that the kid would still eat it; and two, that was how someone fed a _dog_. This was a kid, not an animal. 

And then Iris got an idea, and she grinned at what she hoped was the ingenuity of it. She carefully placed the box of food down on the ground near her, and then hid behind the door. She grabbed the bag of trash, and swung it out into the alley. "Yeah, yeah, I'm coming!" she called over her shoulder, as if she was being called to help with a sudden rush, and then, just for show, muttered that she would take care of the trash later. She took just a moment to make sure that the trash had landed close enough to the to-go box, and then let the door swing closed, catching it with a finger to leave the smallest crack to see through.

The kid had been surprised at her sudden shout, jumping out of the dumpster and ducking behind it. Iris had been right that the kid would be jumpy, it would seem. It took him nearly a full two minutes to finally decide that the coast was clear, and he slowly slunk back to the dumpster, eyes darting to and from the door that Iris was hiding behind. He didn't seem to notice her, but he also didn't seem to care much for the bag of trash that she had thrown. He didn't make even a single twitch towards it. Iris frowned at her failure, but then noticed that the boy was glancing at the bag of trash, his eyes full of suspicion and just a bit of curiosity. His gaze darted to the door, and he returned to the dumpster.

Iris cursed. The bag had to be too close to the door, or he had to be too scared of someone coming back out and catching him. Either way, he apparently deemed it too risky to try and scavenge through the bag.

The boy suddenly sighed, and muttered something under his breath that Iris couldn't make out. He turned, took another look at the door, and practically tip-toed to the bag of trash, eyes going back to the door every other step. About halfway to the bag, he seemed to decide that nobody was going to jump out and scare him off, and quickly closed the distance between him and his prize. He was about to rip open the bag of trash when the box caught his eye. He frowned at it and poked at it with a toe before shrugging and picking it up. The look on his face when he saw its contents was one of jubilation. 

_"Dzastrima!"_  he hissed, and Iris had no idea what it meant, but she could make a pretty good guess. He cast another look around, as if to make sure nobody was sneaking up on him, before quickly closing up the box, and nestling it into his backpack. Just like that, he rose to his feet, seamlessly blended in with a crowd of pedestrians out on the street, and vanished. And just like that, Iris finished taking out the trash, and returned to the counter to help the clueless trainee. 

In the days that followed, Iris made it a habit to be the one to take out the trash in some futile hope that she would see the homeless boy again. She didn't know what it was about him--his vivid eyes, how young he was, that glowing grin when he had realized what had been in the to-go box--that refused to allow him to leave her thoughts completely, but every time she thought that she had moved on, there he was again, popping back into her mind. It was strangely insistent of her subconscious, as if the world itself was telling her, "Hey, keep an eye out for this kid. It's important." 

It wasn't until three or four days later that she saw him again. He wasn't out by the dumpster, but she saw him walking by the big display windows at the front of the coffee shop. If it wasn't for his blue hair, she probably wouldn't have noticed him. What she saw was a bit...concerning. 

He looked like he was paler than he had been before, though that could have just been Iris's opinion. What she knew  _wasn't_  her opinion was the darkening circles under his eyes, and the sheen of sweat on his forehead even though it was too cool outside to warrant it. He seemed to be dragging his feet as he walked, which was a stark difference to the fluidity with which he had moved when she had first seen him. His bright eyes looked duller than before as well, sunken into his skull and glazed over. He looked like he was about to keel over; he looked like a zombie.

Iris was ready for him. She had the to-go box ready before he had even vanished from the windows; she raced out back, placed the box in the dumpster in the least disgusting place she could find, and then booked it back inside at speeds that probably broke the sound barrier. When she went back out to the back alley an hour later to take out the trash, the to-go box was gone. She hoped that the homeless boy found it.

It was only two days later that she saw him for a third time, and he looked no better. In fact, he looked worse; the bags under his eyes were darker, he was definitely paler than before, and his face looked gaunt. Even if he  _hadn't_ gotten the to-go box two days ago, and the last time he had eaten was the first to-go box, it looked like he had gone at least twice as long as he had since he had last eaten.

It was worrisome, and Iris decided to call it quits. Her effort was clearly not helping matters.

Trying to be all sneaky wasn't working, so she was just not going to do that, then. So, telling her coworker--not the trainee, thank god--that she would be back in a minute or two, Iris left out the front door with another to-go box in hand, this one stuffed so full it nearly wouldn't close. She quickened her step to catch up to the homeless boy, who had just veered off into an alley a few doors down from Jitters.

"You look sick," she said, not giving herself even a moment to second-guess her decision to confront the boy. Said boy jumped nearly a foot in the air and spun around, which was clearly not a good idea as an apparent dizzy spell hit him, and he nearly fell right into a wall. If he had planned on running, he clearly wasn't going to be able to now, his eyes practically swimming in his skull as they tried to focus in on her. His inability to escape gave Iris just enough time to say her piece. "Look. I've seen alley cats that have been run over by enough cars to be flattened into a pancake that look better than you do. I don't know where you've been finding food, but it's clearly not been enough, so...I work at the coffee shop down the road, CC Jitters." She tapped the logo on the side of the to-go box. "I can't offer you much, but I can at least offer you more than you're obviously getting. I work every day but Sunday, eight in the morning until one every day and then I'm back from five until nine on Mondays and Fridays. Stop in for food if you'd like." With that Iris put the to-go box on the ground at her feet, turned on her heel, and made to walk back to Jitters.

"The catch?" the boy asked, startling her. It was the first time she had really heard him speak. Before, she had only heard incoherent mumbling that she had assumed were swears, and that one word that was clearly not English. Now, though, she could understand what he was saying. She didn't recognize his accent, though.

"There isn't one," Iris responded once she realized that the boy had actually asked her a question. "I don't want to watch a kid starve." And she left without another word.

Iris wasn't sure when she'd see the boy again, which was why she was surprised that she saw him the very next day. She had been flipping through a magazine during the customary lull in business right around ten in the morning, keeping an eye on everything while her coworker was taking a quick break, when she had glanced up to scan the shop in habit of checking for customers. A flash of blue caught her eye; standing outside near one of the windows decorated with the CC Jitters logo was the homeless boy, his eyes going back and forth between the logo and something in his hand. He looked a bit better than he had yesterday, his eyes a bit brighter and his hands less shaky, but he still did not look healthy enough in Iris's opinion. 

Iris leaned across the counter, her movement catching the boy's eye, and she waved at him with a wide smile. A look flashed across his face, somewhere between surprise and bewilderment, and he slowly raised a hand to wave back. Iris turned the greeting wave into a beckoning one, and after a moment's hesitation, he entered the building. She could tell the second the varying scents hit him, and she could practically hear his stomach growl from across the room. She didn't say anything, though, until he had cautiously made his way to the front counter, looking completely lost on what he was supposed to be doing. 

"You're looking a bit better," she commented. He nodded, a bit slowly, but didn't say anything. Iris pointed to his hand. "What've you got there?" He looked down at his hand, brow furrowed as if he had forgotten he was holding anything, and then showed her. It was a piece of thin white cardboard, stamped with CC Jitter's logo; a piece torn from the side of the to-go box. To help him find right coffee shop, probably. Iris could understand, since there were quite a few coffee shops in the area, and the boy would definitely not want to walk into the wrong one on accident.

"You hungry?" It was a question with an obvious answer, but Iris figured it was a good ice breaker. The boy paused and then nodded hesitantly. "Well, do you know what you'd like? I've sort of just been guessing, so you can choose what you'd like now." The boy just stood there, staring at her, not moving or saying a word. He still looked completely lost, and looking ready to bolt more and more by the second. Iris kept her easy-going smile. "It's still kind of early. How about a breakfast bagel or two? It's got bacon, eggs, and cheese on it. They're really good, I promise. Maybe some grapes on the side? And it's a bit chilly today, so how about a hot chocolate? You can pick out some desert after, if you'd like." The boy looked a tad overwhelmed, but he nodded silently anyway. "Awesome! Go ahead and have a seat wherever you'd like and I'll bring it out in, like, five minutes."

Iris didn't wait to see if he did as instructed, instead turning away to begin preparations on his food. She kept a smile on her face as she worked, but inside, she was frowning. The boy had looked better from far off, but up close, that wasn't the case. His eyes were brighter, yes, but his skin had gotten a bit paler, and his cheeks had sunken further. He obviously wasn't getting enough calories. If Iris had to venture a guess, she would say that he was getting a fourth of what he needed, maybe less. He was starving, that was clear, but it was like he was starving at a faster rate than he should have been. Iris figured it was stress paired up with not eating right; living on the street couldn't be easy, especially at his age. She added extra bacon to his bagels.

Her coworker returned from break while Iris was mixing the hot chocolate, and Iris told her that she was going to go on break herself. Iris was lucky; she and Samantha had a good relationship. She had told Samantha about the homeless boy a few days back, and Samantha had understood immediately, considering she herself had lived on the streets for two months after running away from home when she was younger and a rebellious teenager. While Iris's other coworkers wouldn't understand so readily, Samantha did, so when she had seen the homeless teen perched on the edge of one of the lounge couches as if he feared it swallowing him, she had figured that Iris would be taking her break a bit earlier than usual.

Iris set the tray down on the coffee table in front of the boy, whose eyes snapped to it, though he didn't so much as twitch. Iris sat down across from him and leaned back into the chair with a sigh as her feet finally got relief from standing for so long. She had made her own breakfast bagel while making the boy's two, and readily dug in. She was halfway done with her food when she noticed that the boy still hadn't moved, his unblinking gaze on the tray.

"So, what's your name?" Iris asked, hoping to shake him out of whatever trance he was in. It worked, and his eyes snapped up to meet hers. They were such a brilliant blue it was almost ridiculous.

"The catch, yes?"

Iris wanted to make some lame joke--"Ah, it speaks!"--but she refrained. "I already told you, there is no-"

"Always a catch," he said, slight bitterness to his words. Iris chewed her food and hummed in thought.

"Okay," she said. "The catch is that you eat."

The boy raised both eyebrows in bewilderment. "The catch for food...is to eat?" He sounded incredulous. 

"Yep," Iris said with a nod. "Look, I get it. You live on the streets, you've developed this...distrust of people. Am I right?" The boy didn't respond, but he didn't need to. "That's good. There's a lot of bad people out there. But there's good people, too. People who want to help because it's in their power to. Because they realize when something is wrong and decide to do something about it. People like that might be hard to find, but they exist."

The boy stared at her in silence for a long moment, before picking up the tray and setting it in his lap. "They are rare," he said, and dug into the food with a ferocity that, in any other situation, would have been comical.

After that, the boy stopped digging through the dumpsters, instead coming inside every few days to get a free meal. Iris usually joined him so long as it wasn't too busy, using the time to ask him questions that, for the most part, went unanswered. Iris didn't know whether it was because of his obvious trust issues, or because of his obvious lack of experience with the English language. Either way, she took it upon herself to begin teaching him better grammar and more words, insisting that he speak as clearly as possible, no matter how long it took him to form the sentence. Even with his developing skill with English--and he sure learned fast, faster than Iris thought was normal--he never gave her too many details about his life, and absolutely refused to give her his name. Sure, he gave her names, but he switched them every time she asked, so they were all very obviously fake ones; "Lando" and "Dev", and "Jabba na Hutt", which he had laughed at immediately.

So Iris named him "Blue", and that was that. Except not really, because then she had had to explain to him  _why_  that was his new name, and  _no, blue hair is not a natural color_ , and  _what do you mean you don't dye your hair?_ And then she had been forced to explain what "hair dye" meant after the boy had thought she was talking about literal death, which had been an interesting conversation.

He was odd, but he was also snarky and amusing, and wise in a way that children rarely ever were. Iris liked him.

He also didn't laugh at her, as everybody else did, when she finally broached the subject of the Streak with him. She had been proofreading a blog post about him when she realized that Blue had been hovering over her shoulder, staring intently at the photo of the elusive red blur on her phone's screen. She had been embarrassed at first, prepared for the usual ridicule that she received for believing in what most other people thought to be an urban legend, but instead he had started asking questions, and given some information of his own.

"He is like the others." At Iris's confused tilt of her head, he continued slowly. "Some people are...strange. _Na Ashila_ around them is warped. Lets them do strange things; like the Streak is fast."

"Wait," Iris said, holding up her hand to stop him. "You mean that there's others with powers? You've  _seen_ others?"

Blue nodded. "A man can create clouds. Storms. A woman can...travel fast? Blink?" He held up his hands away from one another, one in a fist and one open, and when he closed the open hand, he opened the fist at the same moment. "Do not know the word." 

"I think you mean she can teleport," Iris supplied, to which Blue shrugged.

"A man is a... _ko-separ ker fayari_? A burning man. He lives with fire on him."

"I can't believe this is happening," Iris breathed, her eyes wide. She couldn't believe that it was all  _real_. Sure, she believed in the Streak, but multiple people popping up with superpowers? It was like her life was suddenly something straight out of a comic book. Seriously, what was next? Aliens? "What did you mean by them being warped?"

Blue straightened his back in that way of his that meant that she was definitely not getting any answer she liked. She had already mentally moved on before he had even said, very vaguely, "They are strange."

They didn't speak about the people with powers in much detail after that, aside from the few times that Blue mentioned seeing the Streak, or when Iris wanted to vent about someone giving her crap over her blog about him. The first time anything really  _new_  about the subject was brought up was a few weeks after Blue had first stepped inside CC Jitters, when he practically came crashing into the coffee shop as if he was being chased. 

"Iris!" he called, banging his hands on the counter. The few early-morning stragglers hanging around jumped at the loud noise, shooting glares at the child making a racket but otherwise minding their own business. 

"She's in the back doing inventory, Blue," Samantha said from over by the espresso machine. "Where's the fire?" At his uncomprehending expression--because there wasn't a fire anywhere as far as he could tell--Samantha said, "What's got you in such a rush?"

"Need Iris," Blue said, his tone urgent. He looked past her, towards the storeroom. "Iris!"

Iris pushed through the door into the back, clipboard in hand as she tucked a pen behind her ear. "Jeez, you're loud when you want to be," Iris commented lightly. Seeing the agitated look on his face, she placed the clipboard down on the counter slowly. "Blue, what's wrong?"

"See him!"

"Full,  _proper_ sentences, Blue."

He made a rumbling groan at the back of his throat. "I saw the sharp man!"

"The what?"

"The sharp man! Kills the no-homes. I saw him."

"You  _what_?" Iris hissed, his improper description for the homeless immediately forgotten. This was way more important than an English lesson. She grabbed his coat sleeve, dragging him halfway to a table before remembering that she was technically supposed to be working. Shooting Samantha a pleading look, the other girl smiled and waved her hand dismissively, picking up the clipboard and an extra pen from the counter before slipping into the back to finish up the inventory list. That covered, Iris shoved Blue into a chair and took her own, glaring at him all the while. "What do you mean there's someone killing homeless people? And what do you mean you saw him?"

Blue frowned. "That...that is what I mean. Sharp man kills the no-homes many times. I saw him." He paused, his cheeks beginning to bleed a vibrant shade of pink. "Am...am I speaking wrong?"

Iris sighed, rubbing her eyes tiredly, already exhausted. Good thing she worked in a coffee shop. "We need to increase your English lessons," she muttered to herself. "Okay, fine. So you saw a murderer. Are you sure it was the right guy?"

"I see him-"

"Saw."

"I _saw_ him kill a no-home man, so. Yes."

"Yep, that's it. We're going to the police."

Blue was on his feet and backing away from the table before Iris could even blink, his head shaking rapidly. "No. They can do nothing. The sharp man is warped."

"All the more reason to go to the police!" Iris insisted. Although, considering the police didn't even believe in the Streak, she had no idea how they were going to convince them that someone with superpowers was cutting down Central City's homeless population. A dreadful thought occurred to her. What if the police didn't even  _know_  about this killer? She hadn't heard about any serial killer on the news recently, and Blue had definitely made it seem like this was not an isolated incident. "They need to know about this guy."

"The  _batska-ra_  know," Blue insisted. "That not help."

"Did you see anything specific with this guy? Anything that could be used to identify him?" Blue nodded slowly. "Then you really do need to tell the police. They need that information. They can help." Blue scoffed, rolling his eyes. "Seriously. What've you got against the police?"

" _Batska-ra_  do not care about the no-homes."

"Maybe not wherever you're from, but here they do." Iris stared intently at the younger boy to see if her words made any impact, but Blue refused to meet her eyes, his gaze locked on his gloved palms. "Blue."

He sighed explosively. "Yes," he said, "I know," and Iris smiled.

"Good. Now, I'm off in a few hours, so if you want to wait, we can go to the precinct--sorry, that's the building the police are in--together. My dad-"

"No," Blue said, cutting her off. "Not go to a  _batska_ base." He cast around the room, drumming his fingers on the tabletop, before quickly going to the front counter and returning with a disposal napkin. He slid it across the table to her. "Write a note?" he asked. Iris tried to hand him the pen from behind her ear, but he shook his head. "Do not write your language."

"You don't know how to write in English?" Iris asked, astounded. "So you can't read it, either?" Blue shook his head. Of _course_  he couldn't. He had already had a fairly good grasp on the language when she had met him--comprehension more than speaking, sure, but still--so she had just assumed that writing had been a part of that. She had been wrong. Adding that to the list of things he needed to learn, she pulled the napkin closer and readied the pen. "What do you want it to say?"

Iris wisely decided not to ask what the rather cryptic note meant, instead correcting his grammar as he dictated what he wanted written. She made sure to write in the most exaggerated and loopy handwriting she could manage while keeping it legible; too many people at the CCPD were familiar with her handwriting for her to just scribble away, and she didn't want to ruin the trust she had built between them by accidentally leading a cop right to her own door and potentially driving Blue away. Once she was done, Blue folded the napkin over itself twice and then slipped it into the pocket of his oversized coat. He stood to leave, but Iris caught his wrist before he could make it too far. She worried her bottom lip between her teeth.

"Blue...until this guy is caught, I want you to come and stay with me. Just until it's safe! If this guy is going around killing homeless people...it's too dangerous for you to be out on the streets right now."

"Always safe," Blue insisted. "He cannot catch me."

"If he's warped like you say, avoiding him won't be like getting away from whoever else you've ever run from."

Blue laughed, which was a sound he rarely made but always caused Iris to feel like something was grabbing and pulling on her very soul. His joy, no matter how small, could practically be felt buzzing in the air, flitting and dancing like a leaf caught in a light breeze. "Escape from a lot," he said. He locked eyes with her, and spoke with a firm but gentle tone, all mirth having fled. "Always safe, Iris." Iris started, pulling back from the younger boy when she felt like something really was grabbing onto her soul. It wasn't a horrible feeling, more like a subtle sensation of fondness and warmth and truth; whatever the hell  _truth_  was supposed to feel like. "I promise."

Iris released a shaky breath. "If you go back on that, I'll end you," she warned, which would have been a much more powerful threat if Blue had known enough English to understand her. "I'll kick you or something," she amended, which Blue nodded to, as if they had just reached some sort of agreement. "Be safe." Blue smiled and offered her a lazy salute as he waltzed backwards through the front doors, disappearing into the flow of people out on the sidewalk. 

Over the coming days, Iris kept an ear out while at home, listening to the chatter of the house's police scanner, and doing her best to gather information from her father without raising suspicion. She wanted to have  _something_  to give to Blue next time he came in to CC Jitters; some sort of news to make him more confident in the efforts of the CCPD to protect the homeless. She was hoping for the news that they had actually caught the bastard, but she knew that murders--especially serial murders--weren't solved as easily as TV liked to pretend. It took time, it took effort, and commonly, it took lives.

She always knew when there was another body found, because every time there was, her father would come home and throw his bag down in frustration, and then drink a few gulps of straight scotch. Once the number of bodies passed ten--which was quite a feat, since serial killers rarely ever got north of ten victims before being caught--his presence was announced on the channel seven news. They didn't make any mention of the killer having superpowers, but Iris really hadn't been expecting them to.

The morning after the eleventh body was found, Iris realized that it had been a while since she had seen Blue, longer than he had ever gone between showing up again. Iris tried to tell herself that there was nothing to worry about.

She didn't believe it.

Two weeks after she had last seen him, she was considering filing a missing person's report, but she knew that she couldn't do that; she didn't even have a real name to start with. Even if her father was a respected detective, she'd probably be laughed right out of the precinct.

A week after that, and there was still nothing. The killer hadn't been caught, and Blue hadn't made any sort of reappearance to let her know that he hadn't starved to death or broken his leg jumping off of a building or something. Iris wasn't worried. No, she had been catapulted straight past simple worry, landing firmly in "reasonable panic" territory. She had no idea where Blue was living, as she had never felt like he would answer her if she asked anyway, so she had no idea where she could go to search for him. None of her coworkers had seen him, either. If only she could move as fast as the Streak; then she would be able to search the entire city for him in a night and be done with it. Maybe find the killer, too.

The Friday night of that third week, Iris found herself mindlessly going through the motions of closing up the coffee shop for the night. She was too wrapped up in her thoughts, which kept returning to her plan; one that she already knew was terrible. Going around to all of the places that the homeless hung out to try and ask around for Blue sounded like a horrible idea, especially when there was a serial killer stalking those poor souls. If her father knew what she was planning to do, he would probably shout at her until her hearing had left to a find a more quiet environment to inhabit.

She had just locked up and started the short walk back to her car when a soft call of her name beckoned to her from the alley. She recognized the accented voice in an instant, but the sudden whisper surprised her, her heart leaping into her throat as she jumped on her toes. That breath-stealing, momentary burst of terror was swallowed in a surge of adrenaline, relief, and overwhelming anger.

"Blue!" she snapped, storming towards the mouth of the alley with an intensity that would frighten a hurricane. "What the fu- I could  _kill_  you!" At that moment she really,  _really_ felt like she could, with Blue just _standing_  there, unapologetic, as if he hadn't vanished for nearly a month without a word.

Blue's head lolled to the side on his neck as if the muscles were no longer there to hold it up, a frown pulling at skin that seemed too pale and too taught. Or maybe it wasn't a frown; if Iris cocked her head, too, it looked more like an uneasy grimace. 

He pulled an arm away from his middle, from where Iris had  _thought_  his hands had been jammed into his pockets. He held it up, watching with foggy interest as the moonlight caught and reflected off of the shining red that coated his fingers. He snorted a laugh that turned into a groan, which sank into a fit of delirious giggling, before finally evolving into a wheezing cough that sounded more like he was choking. 

"Have to wait turn," he informed her. Now he really _did_  frown, looking disappointed. "Sorry. You can kick me now." And then he promptly collapsed, face-planting into the dirty alley cement.

There was no stopping Iris from screaming profanity then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the longest chapter I've typed so far. In case you're confused by the timeline, this chapter starts a day or two after Ezra meets Joe after breaking into the market, and then ends three weeks after Ezra gave Joe the note. As for when this takes place in the Flash, episodes 4-9 take place in the background, and it's been almost a year since the particle accelerator exploded. Hopefully that makes the timeline clearer for people lol.


	5. "If you weren't already dying I would kill you." Or, the One Where Ezra Did Something Stupid

Blue wasn't all there. Iris could tell. He was always so alert, his electric eyes taking in everything and his posture always ready for action. The boy sitting in the passenger seat of her car was like a polar opposite to what she was used to, leaning against the door with his forehead pressed to the window, his eyes half-lidded and his breathing shallow. A spare shirt that Iris had thrown into the back of her car a while ago was pinned between his left forearm and his side, the blood that was already soaking through it ensuring that she would never wear it again. 

At one point he had gone deathly still for a moment, and Iris had been terrified that he had just died, right there in her car, bled out from whatever injury that was sapping away his life. But then he had jerked, gurgled, and begun tapping against the window, muttering to himself in whatever language he spoke.  _"Kanan...voth...ejas theska dapata xia...Kanan..."_

She had wanted to take him to a hospital, the aloud statement of which snapping him out of the hallucination or delusion that he had been caught up in. Once she had explained to him what a hospital was, he had repeatedly refused, at one point attempting to open the car door to bail out when she had insisted. After that she had agreed that hospitals were out, if only to keep him inside her damn car instead of splattering on the asphalt.

The only other idea she had was to take him home, so that was where she went. She made it there in record time, probably-- _definitely_ \--breaking more traffic laws in that thirteen-minute drive than she had in the entire time she had had her license. 

Blue really wasn't a fan of being touched, only having tolerated brief brushes or light holds a few times since meeting Iris, but he leaned on her heavily all the way through the front door, his head down as he focused on where he wanted his feet to go.

She knew her father was home, but she didn't tell Blue that. She didn't want him to pull away at the prospect of meeting someone new, instead deciding to just lead him into the situation and hope that he was too out of it to protest much. Actually, they were both going in without much of a plan, since Iris had no idea how she was supposed to explain to her father what was going on. If only she could sneak past him and handle this on her own, but she had  _no idea what to do_ , so that wasn't actually an option.

She kicked the door closed behind them, the slam of the door smothering the bang of pots and pans echoing from the kitchen. Her father called a greeting, which she returned with a loud call of, "Dad, come here!" She tightened her hold on Blue's arm when he tried to pull away, a mutter of gibberish escaping his lips that she assumed was him protesting in his own language. "We need his help, Blue. I don't know what to do."

_"Ejas samoli trean ro siravole-"_

"That's not English. I don't know what you're saying."

"Sew kit," Blue said, waving his hand in a way that  _might_  have been miming sewing, if his movements weren't so jerky and drunken, looking more like he was trying to swat a fly. "Sew kit. No help. Sew kit.  _Siravole_."

Iris opened her mouth to respond--something along the lines of  _no way in hell am I letting you stitch yourself back together you dumbass_ \--but her father's shocked shout beat her to the punch. 

"Iris, what the hell?!" Her father probably couldn't have looked more surprised if she came riding through the living room on a unicorn that was breathing fire. 

Iris felt Blue tense against her side, his back straightening and muscles coiling like a rearing snake. His eyes were trained on her father, the barest hint of their usual spark flickering weakly in the clouded blue.  _"Batska,"_  he hissed. Iris raised an eyebrow. 

"Yeah, he's a cop. How do you know that?"

_"Ko na batska ejas-"_

"English." 

Blue sighed tiredly. He gestured with his chin. "Gave note."

Iris was surprised that her own father was the cop that Blue knew enough to contact about the serial killer, but apparently she wasn't as surprised as her own father, who looked ready to eject his eyeballs from his skull. "You," Joe said. "You're the thief." He was probably going to say more, but at that moment, Blue's left leg buckled beneath him, nearly bringing him and Iris to the floor. There was time to deal with that later; right now he had bigger things that he had to take care of. Joe rushed forwards to help support Blue's weight, Iris frowning when Blue didn't react when Joe touched him without warning nor permission. "Iris, why isn't he in a hospital?" Blue immediately shook his head and tried to twist from their grip, although he got basically nowhere.

"That's why," Iris said. "He doesn't want to go, Dad. He almost jumped out of the car when I tried to convince him to go." She paused long enough to help maneuver Blue's practical dead weight through the door into the guest room, where they carefully sat him down on the bed. "I didn't know where else to bring him."

After pulling on gloves from their first aid kit, Joe took Blue's left forearm in his hands, peeling the bloodied and shredded clothes away from four gashes of various depths. He released a slow breath, his eyes drawn to Blue's crooked fingers. "Honey, we can't deal with something like this." He didn't know how. Basic first aid he could do very well, but this wasn't basic first aid. This was stitches and staples and splints and glue. This was things that he didn't even know the terms or procedures for. 

But there was someone he knew that  _did_  know those things.

"Iris, go grab my phone."

* * *

Blue didn't even realize that he had passed out until he was waking up again. He would like to think that returning from unintentional unconsciousness was not something that he was particularly familiar with, but he knew that that wasn't the case. So when he felt that odd weightlessness that started just behind his knees before radiating outwards, turning into a firm pressure against his shoulder blades and the back of his head to remind him that,  _hey, yeah, you're still alive_ , he knew immediately that he had fallen unconscious at some point. 

He also knew that the sharp but brief sting in the crook of his right arm was definitely not a good thing to feel when waking up from any type of sleep.

Back home, Blue was known for his explosive awakenings, but this one took the gold; the only way for it to be more violent and explosive would have been for him to include actual bombs. He shot upwards--which he regretted instantly when his bruised ribs pulled--and shoved the unknown hands away from him. Those hands, he found, belonged to a woman with auburn hair that he had never seen before. He wasn't fond of strangers, and  _definitely_  wasn't fond of strangers  _touching_ him. 

That woman held up her hands in a way that was supposed to be placating, but Blue was already scrambling backwards off of the bed that he didn't really remember getting into. "Iris!" he shouted, voice cracking. His eyes darted around the unfamiliar room, looking for anything that he might have recognized. "Iris!"

The door practically flew off of its hinges, slamming against the wall with a crack. And there was Iris, eyes slightly panicked and a piece of toast hanging out of her mouth. She quickly abandoned that piece of toast, tossing it uncaringly onto the end table near the door when she saw Blue practically pinning himself the the far wall.

"Blue! Blue, it's okay! You're at my house, remember?" Blue's eyes weren't focused on her, instead staring directly past her and to the unknown woman that had been much too close to him. "That's Doctor Caitlin Snow. She's a friend!" Iris added when Blue bristled at the title, his eyes instantly suspicious. "She's the only one I know who wouldn't be absolute garbage at trying to patch you up, so we called her to help you, okay?" Instead of responding, Blue presented his right arm to her, along with the needle and plastic tubing that was partially taped to it. Iris glanced back at Caitlin, who, while looking more than a tad confused, raised a rubbery red pack about the size of her hand. "She was setting up a blood transfusion. Uh, that means she was going to give you more blood. You lost a lot."

Blue shook his head and immediately pulled the needle from his elbow, lifting his wrist to his shoulder to press the two parts of his arm together to stop the pinprick of blood that had started to well up. "No," he said firmly. "Do not need."

"Blue, come on. Stop being so stubborn. You need more blood."

"No!"

"Actually," Caitlin cut in before a full-on argument could break out, "he should be fine. His blood pressure was okay, anyway." She pulled a cooler into her lap, and busied herself tucking the blood pack back inside. She peered at him through her bangs. "Just take it easy for a few days, and make sure to drink plenty of water and eat the right things; things high in iron and vitamins B-2, B-6, and B-9. Spinach and yogurt would be good. Beef and orange juice, too."

"I think we have most of that here," Iris thought out loud. "If not, I'll just make Barry run out and get it." Caitlin quirked an eyebrow and her lips twitched. She turned to Blue to get his opinion on the matter, but he looked like he had checked out of the conversation practically before it had started. "We lost you at the vitamin thing, didn't we?" Blue shrugged and nodded. "That's fine. C'mere."

Five minutes later, Blue sat at the kitchen table, swamped in one of Barry's old sweatshirts and a spare blanket that was wrapped around his shoulders. He was shoveling yogurt down his throat like a starving man, determinedly not looking up from the bowl so that he didn't have to look at Joe. The detective was sitting across the table from him and apparently doing his best to stare him down. Blue was willing to bet that he wasn't even blinking, but he could only confirm that if he  _looked_  at him, which he was not eager to do. Making eye contact--or even acknowledging Joe's presence--would open himself up for a discussion, and like hell he wanted to do that. The only thing he could think of that would keep Joe at bay would be Iris, but she was off somewhere doing who knew what; probably off talking to that _doctor_. He didn't want to have any conversations, which was why he was so surprised when he himself was the first to speak.

"He is not caught."

Joe didn't try to play the fool. "No. He isn't." Blue glared at him through his bangs, his grip on the bowl tightening. "Tracking down a murderer isn't that easy, kid. Most crimes without witnesses aren't solved, and we don't have any witnesses. Not any that saw anything substantial. He's going after the homeless. Those people don't have the same kind of personal connections that other people have. There's nothing tying them together  _but_  the fact that they're homeless. That sort of lead doesn't help a lot, unfortunately. It doesn't tell us where to look or who to talk to, or who to suspect." And it really didn't help that the serial killer was a metahuman; that kind of crap just complicated matters even more.

"There is more you can do." There had to be. "Not wait for more death." Joe clenched his jaw, because how in the hell did the kid know that that was the only "plan" the CCPD had at the moment? It wasn't like that kind of stuff was announced on the nightly news. Blue looked ready to smash the bowl on the floor. "You promised,  _batska._ "

"And  _you_  promised that you would be safe and not do anything stupid." Blue stiffened, slowly twisting in his chair to face Iris, who stood in the archway to the dining room with her hands on her hips and fire in her eyes. Crap.

"I promised 'safe'," Blue said. That was  _all_ he had promised.

"Yeah, and you screwed that one up, didn't you?" Iris scoffed. "I saw your arm, Blue. It was practically cut to ribbons. Caitlin says you were lucky you didn't slice an artery and bleed out. Do you call that "being safe"?" Blue at least had the decency to be sheepish as he shook his head. "So then out with it. What'd you do?"

"...something stupid," the young boy muttered. That wasn't good enough though, going by how Iris simply raised an eyebrow instead of relaxing her stance. He sighed. "The sharp man...attack someone. I..." He waved his hand around, making a frustrated noise as he tried to remember the words he wanted. He felt way too sluggish to keep up a conversation in a language he still didn't know too well. "...in between."

"You were attacked by the killer?" Joe asked, speaking over his daughter's enraged but worried shout. Blue nodded. "You're lucky you got away with just a few cuts."

"Not luck," Blue said with a devilish smirk. "Not expect me. Hit that... _lulios gamati_  in the face." He mimed a punch, wincing when the movement pulled at the stitches in his side. He may have gotten in a few nice solid hits, but so had the other guy. 

"And the other guy? The one that he tried to attack originally?"

Blue shrugged. "Safe." At least, he  _hoped_  that that old man was safe. If the sharp man had tracked his original target back down and killed him because Blue had been too busy trying not to bleed to death... Caring for the safety of others was stressful. Blue didn't like it. On the topic of things that he didn't like, Blue turned to Iris again and waved his hand in an odd sort of beckoning gesture. "Coat?" he asked. 

"I hope you don't think you're getting that back," Iris said, crossing her arms with a frown. "That thing was shredded and soaked in blood. We threw it away while you were sleeping." Blue groaned and dropped his head back. It had taken forever to find a coat that had fit him and didn't smell completely disgusting. "Seriously, Blue. We didn't even have to take it off you. It kind of just disintegrated." 

"It is cold," Blue sighed unhappily. Joe raised his eyebrows.

"Do you want another blanket?"

Blue shook his head because no, that was not what he had meant. "Cold  _outside_ ," he clarified with a broad wave of his hand towards the window.

Joe clenched his jaw in a way that was more thoughtful than out of anger, he and Iris making eye contact over the boy's head. "But you're inside right now, kid." He paused to clear his throat. "That was actually something I wanted to talk to you about."

Limited knowledge of the language or no, Blue wasn't an idiot. His shoulders raised in apprehension, his bright gaze burning like fire. "Not stay." Iris cleared her throat. Blue rolled his eyes. "I will not stay."

"Blue, c'mon," Iris huffed, finally taking a seat at the table. "This has gone on long enough, hasn't it? I get why you always refused before to let me help, but things are different now. You're hurt, and there's a serial killer that tried to kill you. Who's to say he won't try and hunt you down to finish the job?" Blue snorted, opening his mouth to make some comment that was almost definitely sarcastic, but Iris cut him off. "I don't care if you had body armor and a rocket launcher, Blue. I still wouldn't let you just sit around and _wait_ for that homicidal maniac to come after you again."

"Look, kid, I get it," Joe cut in. "You've been on your own basically all of your life, right?" Blue tentatively nodded. "So you're used to being on your own. Doing what you want, when you want, without anybody questioning you. I get it. I've got no idea what your past is like, and if you don't want to tell us, then that's your choice. But you don't have to be on your own anymore. You don't have to live on the streets. You don't have to live with the threat of this killer hanging over your head, you don't have to face starvation, and you don't have to steal." Unlike with Iris, when Joe met eyes with him, the child didn't back down, instead staring boldly at him and refusing to apologize. "All I'm saying is that you've got a place here. With us."

"You do not know me," Blue pointed out, voice low.

"True, but apparently my daughter knows you well. And I'm pretty good at reading people. I wouldn't have offered to let you stay here unless I thought that you could be trusted. You just have to trust  _us_."

Blue scoffed. "Trust? You are  _batska_. Only trust from a distance."

"Then trust  _me_ ," Iris said, voice border-lining on desperate.

And just like that, Blue broke. He raised his hands in the air, only stopping when his side twinged painfully. "Okay," he conceded. "Until the sharp man is caught."

Iris nodded, because she could work with that. "Great!" she cried happily. And then with a grin she asked, "Any chance I can get an actual name from you now?" Blue looked like he had been slapped, or at the very least offended. "I'm kidding, Blue. Jeez, lighten up." She pat his shoulder, gentle and quick. "I'm gonna go change the sheets on the bed in the guest bedroom. That's where you'll be staying." Hopefully they could get the blood out of the bedclothes, otherwise they'd have to pitch them. She excused herself from the room quickly, which left Blue and Joe alone. Neither of them looked particularly thrilled.

"Any reason you won't tell my daughter your name?" Joe asked, keeping his tone light and conversational.

Blue rolled his eyes, but surprisingly didn't glare at him. "You can track names, yes?" 

"Well, yeah. But you could at least give her your first name. Tracking without a last name is practically impossible." Well, not actually, but the kid didn't need to know that. Not that Joe was planning on using his name to try and find out where he had come from; not if the kid didn't give him a reason to, anyway. "You should think about it. Blue is kind of a terrible name." Blue really  _did_  look offended then, and Joe couldn't help but crack a smile. "More important question: Did you notice anything else about the...sharp man that you didn't notice before?"

Blue shook his head, but after a brief pause, he nodded. "Blue eyes," he said, gesturing to his face. "Young."

"Young like you?"

"Like Iris," he corrected. "And only the hands are sharp."

"What's that mean?"

"Kick the leg of the sharp man, still have foot." He glanced at his hands and held them up, pointing to his fingers. "These cut." He pointed to his palm and the side of his hands, and then to the rest of him. "Rest not."

"So only his fingers are sharp?" Joe asked, more to himself than to Blue. Ignoring Blue's exuberance at the word he had forgotten--"Fingers!"--Joe said, "That's actually helpful." In an odd, really-only-a-bit kind of way. Really, it was only helpful to those that were  _in the know_ , meaning those at S.T.A.R. labs and himself. And Barry, once it was time to track the son of a bitch down and throw him in the Pipeline. "Anything else?"

"Location?" The kitchen was so silent, Joe could have heard a fly sneeze from across the room. And then he exploded upwards, knocking his chair onto its back with a clatter that had Blue starting in his seat and reaching back towards where his backpack usually rested on his shoulders. 

"You have a  _what_?" Joe exclaimed. "You know where this bastard is hiding?"

Blue wiggled his hand in the air and shrugged. "Follow him. Or, try. Before..." He waved at his slashed arm and bruised ribs. "Not live in city." He pivoted in his chair, frowning. He closed his eyes for a brief second, and then pointed. "That way."

"Northeast of the city? Are you sure?" 

"Follow him to and from many times, so. Yes." Blue looked to his bowl of yogurt, swirling his spoon through what remained, shoving chunks of strawberries from one side to the other with a disappointed sigh. "Never find his home.  _Na Ashila_  around warped not feel right. Hard to track," he said by way of explanation, as if that made any sense at all.

"How'd he get out of the city? Did he drive a car?"

Blue frowned, his nose scrunching up. "What is 'drive'? What is 'car'?"

"Driving is making a car move. And cars are those...metal cart things with four wheels and engines." Joe had never had to tell someone what a car was before; doing so felt strange. He pointed out the back door, to the SUV parked in their neighbor's driveway behind them.

Blue nodded. "Like _takipavzem'kune_  more," he said with a grin, entertained by a joke that only he understood. "Yes. He drive-"

"Drove."

"Your language is stupid. He  _drove_  a car."

"What kind?"

"Light."

"Okay, but what about the make? The model?"

"...light."

Joe wasn't entirely sure what he had been expecting. Of course the kid wouldn't know what a car's make or model was if he hadn't even known the English word for car in the first place. That was like asking someone to identify a dog's breed when they didn't even know what a dog was. Joe pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing his eyes with a tired sigh. "If you saw pictures of different cars, do you think you'd be able to point his out?"

Blue hesitated, but nodded anyway. He froze halfway through the motion, his spine snapping straight and the muscles in his jaw twitching as he clenched his teeth. He twisted in his seat, sucking in a sharp breath when his ribs flexed and pulled, screaming in protest. He had a fraction of a second to school his expression before the front door swung open and slammed closed in the same beat, the new arrival sweeping in with wide eyes.

"Cisco called and said Caitlin ran out in a hurry. What happened? Are you guys okay?" 

"No running in the house, Barry," Joe called pointedly, raising his eyebrows and gesturing with his eyes to the back of Blue's head. Barry locked eyes with the younger boy. Blue bristled like an irate cat, his shoulders rising defensively. "We're okay. Our little thief here had a bit of an accident is all." The friendly, gently-delivered gibe had been intended to defuse the one-sided tension that was mounting in the room, but Joe might as well have not spoken at all. Blue didn't seem to have heard him, still staring with an unsettling stillness at Barry, frozen as if he had stumbled across a mountain lion instead of an awkward forensic scientist that still teared up at videos of dogs greeting soldiers after they returned home. "Blue, you good?"

Iris came whirling into the dining room like a hurricane of hair, limbs, and bedclothes, her arms piled high with the sheets from the guest room's bed. Her face brightened, erupting like a supernova the moment her eyes landed on the newest arrival. Barry did his best to not stare at her too long.

Joe hid a grin in his shoulder. Oh, his clueless,  _clueless_  children.

"Barry! Hi! What're you doing here?"

"Uh...I heard Caitlin was here." 

"She was. You just missed her. Sorry." Her attention drifted over to her father, who was slowly listing sideways with a frown, attempting to see if Blue was even still  _breathing_. He still hadn't moved, aside from a twitch when Iris had spun back into the room. "Oh! Blue, this is Barry. He's family." She gave him a quick, one-armed hug with a large smile, and some of the tension bled out of Blue's shoulders. "He works with my dad."

Blue kicked an eyebrow up beneath his bangs. "He is  _batska?"_ he asked, looking unconvinced, or unimpressed. Barry had no idea what he had said, but he still felt a tad offended.

"No, he's not an actual cop. He just works with them."

"He has a badge?"

"Well, yeah."

"Then he is  _batska,"_  Blue snorted. 

"Well, then, he's a good cop. Like my dad." She pinned Barry with the kind of look she only used when she meant for someone to do something that they should have done already. It was between a kind stare and a cool glare, which somehow managed to be both threatening and disarming at the same time. It also had the added benefit of making someone feel guilty, although about what they usually had no idea. Barry liked to call it "The Flower Glower". Never to Iris's face, though. She had a wicked right cross that he didn't like being on the receiving end of. "Blue doesn't trust cops."

Barry wasn't surprised about that, considering not a lot of people did anymore. Not that he could really  _blame_  them. Cops were limited in what they could do; it was why he secretly got dressed up in a glorified red onesie before speeding around the city. Vigilantes weren't as limited as the police. Vigilantes were also supposed to have secret identities, which meant that he couldn't just say that he was one to try and get the kid to stop staring at him as if he had just stepped on his sandcastle or something. Of course, Iris still didn't know that he was a metahuman vigilante, so it was highly unlikely that that was what she had been trying to get him to do to put the kid at ease. So Barry just did the thing that he did best.

He babbled.

And babbled.

And babbled.

Barry was halfway through his impromptu lecture about how doing bullet and firing pin comparisons  _totally sucked_ more than fingerprint matching when Blue couldn't take it anymore, and he erupted into a fit of chuckling. He apologized, and said, "You are like someone I know. A...forgot the word? Steals ships.  _From_  ships. Well. Steals ships, also. He talks much, like you do."

"...did you just compare me to a pirate?" Barry asked, looking torn between being pleased and miffed. Joe just looked like he had a migraine knocking at his brain's door. 

Iris returned from dumping the stained sheets in the washing machine a few minutes later, taking the relative silence in the kitchen as a good sign. A glowing, warm mass settled at the base of her throat when she saw Barry seated beside Blue at the kitchen table, doing his best to teach the younger boy a number of scientific terms that Blue would probably never have to use in his life. Blue, who had always taken to English lessons like a duck to water, eagerly absorbed every useless word Barry gifted him with.

Joe was off in his own little world, rubbing his forehead and eyeing the bottle of whiskey on the counter.

Iris moved to collect Blue's empty yogurt bowl from the table. She had barely slid it away from his elbow before he caught her wrist in a firm grip, moving faster than she could keep track of. She would be lying if she said his lightning speed didn't make her jump every now and again, even though she should have been used to it after knowing him for so many weeks.

"What's wrong, Blue? Did you want more?" she asked.

Blue shook his head. "No," he said. "Not 'Blue'." He glanced over at Joe for the briefest of moments, his brow furrowing in a split second of indecision. After a beat, he made up his mind. "Ezra. My name is Ezra."

Iris grinned. "Nice to finally meet you, Ezra."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early update because of May the 4th. I thought about typing up some random little filler snippet and uploading that, but then I was like, "Nah, take an entire chapter." I couldn't NOT upload a chapter on the Star Wars holiday...


	6. "This is stupid. Everything is stupid." Or, the One Where Ezra Regrets Everything but Gyros

Convincing Ezra to come down to the police department had been...interesting. It had involved much arguing, which had evolved into yelling. As is to be expected, having an argument with someone that had just a rudimentary grasp on the utilized language made the argument deteriorate at a remarkable rate, to the point where Joe was pretty sure Ezra was just shouting profanity. Iris had swept in like a merciful god after half an hour of chaos, declaring with a gentle voice and a firm gaze that Ezra was going to accompany her father to the police station, and that was final. Ezra had tried to get into a stare down with her, but Iris was having none of that, so the young boy threw his arms in the air and accepted his fate.

Not that he was happy about it, which he made sure to remind Joe of every second of the ride to work the next morning.

"Hey,  _you_  said you'd help find this guy's car," Joe reminded him as they pulled into the parking garage. 

Ezra curled his lip in distaste. "Yes. But not in  _batska_  base."

"I thought Iris made it clear that the cops here aren't like the ones you're used to?"

"You and Barry, maybe," Ezra conceded with an indifferent shrug. "But others? Do not know them. Stay away from  _batska_. More safe if not seen or known."

Joe pat Ezra on the shoulder before hefting himself out of his car, the boy following his example with the inconvenienced scowl that all teenagers seemed to pull off so well, no matter the situation. Iris had used it once when her hair dryer had sparked and caught on fire at random during her freshman year of college. She had watched on as the device blazed and the plastic melted, that same affronted stare on her face, looking more like she had stepped in gum rather than witness an impromptu bonfire indoors. Joe wondered if he had been that apathetic as a young adult. He probably had.

"Just stick with me, kid, and there won't be anyone giving you any trouble."

The precinct was too busy for there to be any teasing on the behalf of the unwilling new arrival, anyway. Everybody was scurrying around like chickens with their heads cut off, or ants after a dropped french fry. Ezra looked overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle, his eyes wide as he subconsciously pressed closer to Joe's side. Unbeknownst to his guide, Ezra hadn't been in such a busy, enclosed area in months. Sure, Central City was hectic and crowded, but that was outside, without the confines of walls and ceilings. There was just a different air inside a police department. Outside, Ezra had anonymity, but inside the CCPD, he felt like everything--from the desks to the dust on the ceiling--had eyes, all of which were trained on him. It was unsettling. He wished that he still had his hooded sweatshirt, but that had been thrown out along with his coat. The old shirt that Barry had lent him was a size too big, and much too thin for his tastes. He felt like it wouldn't even offer protection from a stick.

"What is happening?" Ezra asked, keeping his voice low.

"I don't know," Joe responded with a distracted tone, his eyes casting around the room. He found who he was looking for the same instant his captain found  _him_. 

"Joe. You're here," Singh sighed with relief, striding up to the detective with a no-nonsense air about him. "Now leave. They just found a body in the alley by 9th and 14th. Elderly homeless man, missing his hands. This one was really cut up, like the killer was angry. Angri _er_." At Joe's side, Ezra's jaw tightened, and his right hand clenched into a fist. He said nothing. "I want you running point on that one."

"'That one'?" Joe parroted.

"There's two more bodies. Both homeless, both missing their hands, and both butchered worse than usual. Patterson's at the one on 13th and 42nd, and I've got Blake at the underpass by 3rd and the Concord Loop." The captain sighed and rubbed his eyes, seeming to age a decade in a matter of seconds. "And  _I've_  got to go deal with the media shitstorm brewing over 'police incompetence' and 'misplaced priorities', and try to get them to stop giving this nutjob nicknames." Which, he knew, was next to impossible. The media apparently didn't care that giving these types of people  _names_  and  _attention_  just made everything  _so much worse_. The public was particularly fond of the moniker, "The Drifter Ripper". Everybody always wanted their own local Ripper to make legends about. "I already sent Allen down to your scene."

Joe glanced at Ezra quickly with a creased brow. "Okay," he agreed. Singh noticed Joe's hesitance, and turned his attention to the quiet boy that was doing his best to blend in with Joe's shadow. 

"Who's this?" Singh asked flatly. "I didn't know you were arresting jaywalkers."

"He's not a jaywalker. He's a street kid; says he saw our guy the other night, and saw him get into a car. I was going to get him to look through a database and try to find the make and model."

Singh was impressed, but only marginally. He looked more skeptical than anything else. "You witnessed one of the attacks?" he asked.

Ezra's head snapped up and he locked eyes with the older man, his gaze like steel, refusing to back down or be intimidated. "Yes."

The captain hummed. "Good enough for me. Give him to Thawne, and then get down to your scene, Detective."

Ezra whirled to Joe after Singh had walked away, a brief expression of panic flitting across his face. "Have to stay here?" he asked, voice border-lining on an apprehensive squeak. He gestured to the room swarming with police. "Do not know them!"

Joe peered back through the crowd, relieved to see that his partner hadn't moved from where he had spotted him a few minutes prior. He raised his hand in the air to draw Eddie's attention, and then waved him over. "You'll be fine. Most of these guys will be leaving soon, anyway. You'll be in good hands; Eddie's my partner."

At the mention of his partner's name, Ezra turned all of his attention to the throng of police officers and detectives, eyes darting around as he tried to guess which one worked with his current guide. 

"Ready for another rousing day of murder and mayhem?" Eddie quipped as he approached. He didn't take nearly as long as Singh to notice Ezra, and flashed him a crooked grin. "Iris texted and said Joe was bringing you along. Blue, right? I'm-"

"Eddie, the, uh...man that Iris loves." Ezra paused, his eyebrows lowering as he thought. " _Boy-friend_?" He looked to Joe to see if he got the word right. At Joe's nod, Ezra grinned in triumph. " _Syastra_! You are Eddie, the boyfriend of Iris."

Eddie smiled, purposefully not glancing in Joe's direction. That particular topic was still a bit awkward between them. They avoided it as if it was a starving bear on fire, for the good of their working relationship. "I take it Iris's talked about me?"

"Yes. Many times."

"All good things, I hope." Eddie shifted his attention back to the matter at hand. "We're not bringing him with to the scene, are we? The front desk can probably keep an eye on him until we get back. It's Eliza today."

Joe shook his head. "He's not going to the scene, and neither are you, partner. Blue Boy here saw our killer,  _and_  what car he drives. You're going to help him go through our database and try to figure out what make and model we should be looking for, while  _I_  go see what our friend left for us this time."

Eddie bobbed his head in understanding. "You got it." He was only a bit disappointed about being left behind. Seeing a grisly crime scene was never easy, but he would rather be there than trapped inside the monotony of the bullpen. He had been  _this close_. Now all he could do was go back to getting caught up on paperwork. What fun.

Joe distractedly checked the time on his phone and shuffled a bit closer to the elevator's doors. "I should be back in a few hours. If you need anything, have Eddie call me," Joe called over his shoulder, the doors sliding closed behind him. And then Ezra was alone, left with someone that was just about a complete stranger, in what he would normally consider enemy territory. He should have put up more of a fight over going to the precinct. 

Eddie was an entertaining individual, at least, which distracted Ezra from the uneasy feeling that had been roiling in his gut all morning. He wasn't no-nonsense like Joe, or passionately kind like Iris. He was a bit of a mix, with a familiar determined air about him, but a playful attitude that made people naturally gravitate towards him. He didn't treat Ezra like an idiot kid, either, which was refreshing. Everybody that Ezra had interacted with seemed to assume that he was lacking in intelligence just because he didn't speak English well enough to communicate his thoughts properly, or because he was a kid, or because he lived on the streets. Those that didn't outright sneer at him spoke to him differently than they did to other people, and handled him with kid gloves. Even Joe and Iris were guilty of it on occasion and in minute ways that Ezra was sure they didn't consciously intend.

Eddie was different. He didn't pull punches or try to dance around subjects that most people thought children Ezra's age shouldn't know. He spoke to Ezra with a casual tone as if they had known one another for years instead of minutes. He didn't purposefully dumb his language down to what he thought Ezra would understand, which meant that Ezra only processed about half of what he said, but Ezra was okay with it. Any word he couldn't translate, he filed away to ask about later.

Ezra was sat in a desk chair that was dragged over to Eddie's work space, stolen from another officer's desk without a second thought. The blond detective left him there for nearly seven minutes of tense boredom, in which Ezra entertained himself by picking at the edges of the bandages on his forearm and spinning in dizzying circles in his chair. When Eddie returned, he lugged with him possibly the largest binder on the entire planet, the thing almost as thick as both of Ezra's arms combined. The colossal  _THUMP_ it made when the detective dropped it on his desktop was deafening, chasing all activity from the building for just a moment before the usual hustle and bustle resumed.

_"Gama na dzastri-ra!"_

"Whoo, that sounded like a swear," Eddie chuckled. He pat the cover of the binder with a pitying expression. "Yeah, there's a lot. And this is just from the past two decades or so. You better start praying that this bastard drives a car post-'95, otherwise we're about to waste a  _lot_  of time."

Ezra understood  _some_  of what Eddie said, but it was enough to gather that he was about to enter a situation that could only end in frustration and a headache.

Eddie watched, entirely confused, while Ezra held his hand out over the binder, palm down, and closed his eyes. His brow creased in concentration and just the slightest bit of hope. An eerie stillness settled over the young boy, like he was frozen in time, or perhaps existing on another plane altogether. And then Ezra clicked his tongue, dropped his arm, and flipped his bangs out of his face with an exasperated shake of his head. He pulled the binder into his lap with a scowl, and Eddie accepted that foreign rituals made no sense to him.

Two hours later, Ezra felt like his eyes were trying to recede into the back of his skull. Not that he could blame them for their coup. If given the option, he too would choose to curl up and retreat into a nice, dark, hidden space. Unlike his eyes, however, which were blessed with the safety of his skull, the best he could do would be to try and cram himself under Eddie's desk and hope for the best.

He had pilfered a sheet of scrap paper and a pen from Eddie's desk, which he had used to note the page number that held pictures of cars that  _might_  have been the one he saw the killer climb into. Each page was labeled with what Ezra assumed was the car's make and model--whatever that meant; he still had no idea--in English, but trying to copy the letters took too much time and effort. There were just so  _many_ , and he still had no idea what any of them meant or sounded like. He and Iris had never gotten around to his lessons on written English, unfortunately. Some higher power had to be looking out for him, though, because the pages had a shorter label at the bottom--Ezra assumed they were numbers--which were much easier to copy down. It definitely helped that they looked similar to the numbers he was familiar with. If only the rest of the alphabet was so easy.

Ezra had just written what felt like his millionth--but was probably only the twenty-fifth--page number when his patience snapped like a dry twig that was half-eaten by rot. Figurative termites, which looked suspiciously like the hundreds of cars he had looked at, scattered from the splinters of the metaphorical stick. His mind's eye scurrying with thousands of little termite-cars, Ezra placed the binder back onto Eddie's desk with slow, deliberate movements.

"This is impossible," he declared. "Fights with  _na Inkrurian-ra_  more easy!"

Eddie looked over from his paperwork, and found himself surprised. Only two hours, and Ezra had managed to power through over half of the binder. Narrowing hundreds of cars down to the low double-digits was truly impressive. "A lot of cars look alike, especially to the untrained eye." He glanced at the clock on his computer and winced. Almost noon. "Tell you what. Why don't we take a break and go get something to eat? There's a food truck that parks right down the street from here. You like gyros?" 

Ezra shrugged. Hell if he knew what a "gyro" was. But food was food, and once Eddie mentioned it, Ezra realized that he was  _starving_. He felt like he always was nowadays. In any case, he was willing to eat dirt if it meant not having to stare at the binder for a couple of minutes.

The cool air and warm sun outside felt like heaven. Growing up as he had, Ezra spent most of his time outdoors or in abandoned structures, to the point where it felt unnatural to be inside a proper building for too long. Outside, where he could move and breathe, was where he thrived. The tension dripped off of him, like mud in a rainstorm, and every part of him felt lighter. He would have ran all the way to the food truck if he could, but he doubted Eddie would want to, and he didn't actually know where the truck was parked.

Even once Ezra held a gyro in his hands, he still had no idea what it was supposed to be. It smelled good and tasted better, but even as he chewed on the spicy meat and licked the sauce from his fingers, he couldn't figure out what it was. He knew he wanted at least ten more, though, which Eddie laughed at before asking if he was serious. 

"Start with two and then go from there, bud."

Ezra was polishing off his fourth gyro, much to the astonishment of the owner of the truck and Eddie--"Seriously, Blue, you're skinny as hell, where are you putting all of it?"--when he inexplicably froze, gyro halfway to his mouth. At first Eddie thought that he had finally hit the metaphorical food wall and was about to experience the mother of all stomachaches, but Ezra didn't curl in on himself with a groan. Instead, his head snapped around, his jaw set and eyebrows lowered as his eyes darted around the crowded parking lot, and the busy road beyond.

Eddie tried to follow his gaze. He found the target easily enough, considering the short man was the only thing standing still in the swarming sea of human bodies across the street, his piercing blue eyes glaring Ezra down with an icy hatred that could have frozen an erupting volcano on the surface of the sun. 

"What's wrong? You know that guy?"

Ezra dropped what remained of his gyro, his food forgotten. 

"Blue?"

The man turned and melted into the crowd, and Ezra took off after him like a bullet. Eddie's surprised shout--oh, Joe was going to _kill_  him for losing his stray--was drowned out by the squeal of tires and the loud blaring of agitated horns as he leaped, ducked, and rolled his way across the street, weaving between the cars and trucks as if he knew where they were going to be before the drivers themselves did. 

Eddie tried his best to follow, waving his badge in the air and shouting for everyone to get out of his way, but Ezra was smaller and faster, and immensely more agile. Eddie lost him for good in an alley, watching with a dropped jaw and a heaving chest as Ezra jumped, shoved off of the grimy wall with his foot, and _sailed_  skywards, flying up until he grabbed onto a light fixture sticking out of the brick.  _Fifteen feet up in the air_. Ezra swung himself around like an Olympic gymnast, planted his feet on the creaking metal bar, and pushed. He rocketed up the last ten feet to fling himself up and over the ledge, vanishing onto the rooftop beyond.

Eddie felt his brain grind to a halt, his logical mind stuttering and sweating as it tried to pick apart just how the physics of what Ezra had just done  _worked_. He  _knew_  parkour could get pretty ridiculous and gravity-defying, but  _hot damn_. Eddie thanked god that the kid wasn't a criminal; the cops would never be able to catch him if he was.

There were more important things than gaping at fancy running and jumping. Something had spooked Ezra, enough for him to sprint across a busy road and then scale a building. Eddie had no idea what had triggered the behavior, only that it somehow involved that man that had been staring at Ezra as if he was a gallon of milk that had been left out to sour in the sun.

Eddie pulled his phone out of his pocket, already dreading the call he was about to make.

"Joe? So, uh, funny story." 

* * *

Joe had no idea where he had gone wrong in life to make it as it was now. Whatever bog-dwelling witch he had pissed off, he wanted to find her and apologize. Maybe then his life would be set right.

Barry watched on with thinly-veiled interest as Joe paced back and forth just beyond the crime scene tape, phone pressed to his ear. If only super hearing had been included with his super speed; then he would know what had his foster father so riled up.

"Well why did he run off?" Turn, step, step. "Did you recognize him?" Turn, step, step. "What'd this guy look like, exactly?" Turn, step, step. Turn, step, step. Pause. "Which way did he go?" Joe didn't move. "Okay. No, go back to the precinct, I'll find him." A beat. "No, Eddie, I'm not mad. Goodbye." Joe hung up and took a deep, cleansing breath. "He is  _so_  grounded."

"Eddie's an adult and not your kid, Joe. I don't think you can ground him."

"Not Eddie.  _Ezra_."

"Oh." Barry frowned. "What'd he do?"

Joe waved an officer over and signed the last of the paperwork he needed to maintain the chain of evidence, officially leaving the scene in other, less busy hands. Nodding for Barry to follow him, he strode quickly down the sidewalk, slipping through the gaggle of onlookers with all the speed and skill of a law enforcement officer experienced in getting from one end of a crowd to the other in a short amount of time.

"I'm damn near positive Ezra saw the Ripper." Oh, look, he was using the name now, too; Singh was sure to be pleased.

The pieces of the puzzle from the overheard half-conversation fell into place. "And he _chased after him_?" Joe nodded. "I don't know if that's dedicated or stupid."

"Considering just last night he almost lost an arm to this guy, I'd say it was stupid." Hence Joe's instinctual desire to ground him. If Ezra had been his kid... 

_'But he's not your kid,'_  his brain tried to remind him.  

_'Doesn't matter,'_  he reminded his brain in turn.  _'I'm still grounding him.'_

"So what's the plan?" Barry asked. He dropped his voice, whispering, "Want me to run around and find him?"

"Not yet," Joe responded, fishing his car keys out of his pocket. "The way he was heading, he's going to run out of rooftops soon. Unless he plans to chase the Ripper from on top of skyscrapers, he's going to have to get back on the street." And Joe had a pretty good idea where the thief might hit the pavement again. Barry had slid into the passenger seat and gotten buckled even before Joe had gotten his door all the way open. The detective raised an eyebrow.

"What? The Ripper might be there, Joe."

Joe sighed. "Just...don't let Ezra see you."

Barry grinned. "C'mon, Joe. Nobody ever sees me." 

* * *

Ezra hit the ground with a  _KER-THUD_ , rolling off of his shoulder and popping back up onto his feet. He had to hurry. He had fallen behind after a dog on one rooftop had objected to sharing it with him for the ten seconds it would have taken him to cross it. He had run out of rooftops to take advantage of, too, which meant if he wanted to catch up, he had to struggle and force his way through the crowded sidewalks. 

He wasn't going to get away from him again.

Ezra had just made it to the mouth of the alley when he felt the overwhelming need to jump backwards. He listened to the instinct without a second thought, stopping on his toes and leaping away right as a car slammed on its breaks with a squeal of tires and the bite of rocks on asphalt. 

Joe climbed out of his car before it had fully shifted into park, the door swinging wide and tipping over a trashcan. Joe ignored it, instead busying himself with fuming and glowering like any good father/detective would. 

"What do you think you're doing?" Joe snapped. He already knew what Ezra was doing. Besides the obvious, he was doing something _idiotic_. Joe had plenty experience with children doing foolish things; he just thought that, since his children were grown up, he was done dealing with that. But, surprise surprise, the universe had other plans for him.

Ezra's attention snapped back around to him, his eyes having been darting around the intersection of alleyways, always returning to Joe's empty passenger seat with a furrowed brow. He frowned, as if what Joe had said had stumped him. "Saw the sharp man!"

"I know. What'd you think you'd do if you caught him?" the detective demanded, tone heated. "Might I remind you that last time you confronted him, he got within a few inches of killing you?"

"Will not give him the few inches this time!" Ezra tried to shove his way past Joe, but the detective's hand clapped down on his shoulder like a vice, jerking him back when he tried to duck out of the hold.

"Do you have a death wish or something?" Joe snapped. Ezra tried to shake him off a second time, but he pulled the kid back again. "Look at me! Why is it so important that you be the one to get this guy?" His phone rang in his pocket, but he ignored it. "Well? Why does it have to be you?"

Ezra whirled on him, his glare packing a punch that almost felt physical, like a fist right to the center of Joe's chest. He took a step back, his breath feeling tight in his chest, and for just a moment, Ezra looked guilty. Then all of that anger from before came flooding back, and he snarled, "Because this is my fault, Joe!"

The silence in the alley was so thick, it could have suffocated an elephant. Joe wasn't entirely sure how he was supposed to follow that one up. His phone chimed again in his pocket, so he answered that instead. 

_"He got away,"_  Barry said the moment the line connected.  _"I mean, I think he did? I don't know. I ran in a mile in any direction from you but nobody_ looked _like a metahuman serial killer, and there were a lot of people that looked kind of like how Ezra described but I can't just start abducting innocent people off the street because they might be chopping the hands off homeless people, and-"_

"Barry, you're talking too fast." His voice was starting to buzz, the words blurring together into a solid string of sound, like accelerated audio without an increase in pitch. Barry did that sometimes, whenever he wasn't paying attention or when he really got into one of his babbling rants.

_"Sorry."_ He paused.  _"About talking too fast, but sorry for losing the Ripper, too."_

"It's fine," Joe sighed, rubbing at his eyes with his free hand. "You didn't know what you were looking for."

_"Yeah, about that. I called Cisco, and he thinks we might be able to use the satellites to see what car this guy drives by looking at the footage from last night."_

That was the best news Joe had heard all day. "Good. I'll meet you at the lab once I finish dealing with this," Joe said, glancing back to Ezra, who had been shuffling farther and farther away from him during the phone call. Trying to slip away while he was distracted, no doubt. He disconnected the call without another word. Ezra shifted awkwardly on his feet, trying not to make eye contact.

"Go," Ezra said with a jerk of his chin. "Can find way back to _batska_  base."

"Oh no you don't." Joe placed a hand against Ezra's back, pressing firmly against his shoulder blades to force him towards the passenger side of his car. He opened the door, and politely forced the shorter boy inside. "You got away from Eddie once; that won't be happening again." And even if he did feel okay sending Ezra back into Eddie's care, there was no way he was going to let Ezra just walk back on his own, making it easier for him to vanish again in search of the metahuman. "You're coming with me."

Ezra pouted for all of two minutes before his curiosity got the better of him. "Where?" he asked.

"S.T.A.R. Labs."

Ezra hummed, repeating the words quietly to himself. They were unfamiliar; Iris had never mentioned them. He wondered what they meant. "Do they have gyros?" 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait for this chapter! I had study week, then finals week, and then I had to move back home for the summer, go back to work, and then I was pulled along on family vacation...so let's just say I had a hectic few weeks, and posting the next chapter got pushed to the side. Hopefully y'all liked it enough to make up for the wait lol


	7. "Hollywood warned me about this." Or, the One Where Ezra Gets Locked in a Closet and Jumps to Conclusions

Ezra still had no idea what "S.T.A.R. Labs" was, but he was beginning to think that he wasn't going to be getting any gyros.

 

For one, the building that Joe had brought him to looked even worse for wear than where he had been living since returning to Central City. It had a huge chunk taken out of one side, with the skeleton of reconstruction hovering around the building's gaping wound. The inside looked better, for the most part, and looked more in line with what Ezra was familiar with. He had been curious to the point of almost-- _almost_ \--forgetting all about why his arm and ribs ached something awful, or why he and Joe had come to the broken building in the first place. 

And then Joe had shoved him into an empty broom closet, told him to stay put, and then slammed the door closed in Ezra's face. 

The electronic lock, without an interface on the inside for Ezra to fiddle with, snapped closed with a buzz of energy.

It took almost a full minute of agonizing silence for Ezra to fully comprehend what had just happened.  _'Did he just lock me in a closet?'_  He tried the door handle for good measure. It didn't even twitch. _'He just locked me in a closet!'_ Ezra banged on the door with his fist, wondering just how hard he would have to hit it to knock it off its hinges. He wouldn't actually, of course, as that would raise too many questions that he didn't want to answer, but he sure as hell still wanted to. He hit the door again. _"Batska!_  Open the door! You- you stupid-" He wished he knew more insults in English. " _Batscobre,_  come back!"

The door remained closed, and Ezra remained enraged. He kicked the door again, just to make himself feel better, and then turned away, determined to ignore it.

He never should have agreed to stay with Iris and her father. No matter how much he liked Iris and wanted to see her happy,  _nothing_  was worse than having to trust the word of a cop. Not to Ezra, anyway. His entire life, authoritative officers had been another obstacle in the game of survival, put in his path to either avoid or exploit. No matter what he did with them, it was always at a distance. Even later, after he had found a new family and taken up a role that placed him up close and personal with officers of the government, he still kept out of their line of sight whenever he could.

After arriving in Central City three hundred fifty-seven days ago, the officers of the government--or "cops", as the locals called them--had seemed different; like they were actually there to help the people instead of further the goals of the government. At first, the stark contrast between what he saw and what he knew threw Ezra for a loop. Cops seemed more like the stories of the officers of the old government back home. Maybe he could actually rely on these  _batska,_  unlike the  _batksa_  he was used to. 

And then he had learned more about his new home. He caught glimpses of media that showed what the government did to people like him. He heard stories, after he picked up a bit of English, about what some officers of the government did to people that came from different lands. He experienced their aggression firsthand on a few occasions, when he had tried sleeping in places that he wasn't allowed, or caught swiping things from street stalls. In one instance, a cop had tricked him, and learned more about him than anyone in this new place should have. Ezra was not keen to make that mistake--or any mistakes--again. He was safer on his own.

And then one woman had changed all that, and had dragged him into close proximity with a cop before he had even realized what was happening.

And now he was locked in a closet, and he had  _no idea why._  Ezra tried to remain positive, he really did, but he just couldn't help himself. His imagination got the better of him, whispering poisonous thoughts in his ears, feeding his fear with visions of pain. Maybe they had found out the truth about him, and Joe had brought him somewhere to turn him over to his government's higher-ups. Now that he really thought about it, "lab" was a vaguely familiar word. He had heard it while he was first trying to puzzle out the beginnings of his English knowledge, in the movies where people like him were captured, restrained, and cut up. "Lab" was a bad word, a dangerous word; a word that he didn't want to be anywhere near. _Ever._

_'Yeah, time to go.'_

Ezra turned back to the door, sizing it up like he would an armed enemy. He had to strategize, or he would get nowhere. He pressed his palm against the metal door and pushed, feeling it buckle just a bit beneath his fingers, the hinges beginning to groan in protest. He knew that he could knock it out of the wall if he hit it,  _really_ hit it, but then everybody in the lab would know that he had escaped. Who knew how many people were there, or whether or not there were guards on the other side, prepared to strike out at him if he got out? The door would have to be his last option. Maybe he could get out through the wall. He had his backpack with him--as he always did--so if he really had to, he supposed he could just  _cut through_  the wall.

Something poked at his attention, right at the edges of his subconscious. His eyes followed the feeling to it's source; a vent, tucked away behind an empty shelving unit in the back corner. 

Ezra grinned. 

_'Amateurs.'_

* * *

The duct was a tight fit. Either Ezra had gotten taller, or the ducts here were smaller than back home. Considering how many longer sizes of pants he had had to scavenge since first arriving in Central City, he assumed it was the former, which was nice since he had always been so short, but his growth was hardly conducive to his escape. Still, he fit well enough; if he wore his backpack across his chest instead, he could still manage a half-crawl, half-slide that allowed him to quietly shuffle towards what he  _hoped_ was freedom.

 

The farther he got from the closet, and the longer he crawled, though, the more he wondered if he was making a mistake. He had  _never_  made an escape and gone so long without an alarm being raised. It was usually three,  _maybe_  four minutes of scrambling before an alert would go out that he wasn't where the guards had left him. But by his count, it was nearing the eleven-minute mark, and the only things he could hear were the creak of the metal around him, the whir of the fans down offshoot vents, and his own breath echoing back at him.

He was willing to entertain the idea that he might have jumped the gun.

Voices drew his attention away from any musing he was doing to entertain himself in his breakout. He would have kept going, but the topic of conversation interested him. Namely, it was about the sharp man; _"Nastravan'aikos"_ , as Ezra referred to him. He followed the echoing voices, pausing to listen intently at intersections, and then just followed his gut when he couldn't tell where the sound was coming from. 

The conversation filtered up through a grate in the floor of the duct, the slats spaced just wide enough for Ezra to peer through to the room below. Four people stood in a poor excuse for a circle near a curving computer terminal, each one trying to talk over the other, succeeding in nothing but creating a great racket that Ezra had no hope of deciphering. He recognized Barry and the doctor--another word to avoid--Caitlin, but the other two males didn't even from a spark of recognition.

One of them was sat in a wheelchair, his hands folded in his lap, and his face was of the friendly sort that invited conversation and radiated kindness. But something felt... _off_  about him. The other three exuded warmth--Barry more so than the others--but this man was barely room temperature; downright chilly in comparison. In Ezra's eyes, the space around him almost seemed to twist and coil, like it didn't dare touch him, willing to leave him alone so long as he didn't come near it. Ezra had never seen anything like it. But he had also seen many strange things since he had been ripped from familiarity, so he shrugged and pushed the feeling to the back of his mind, where it would be ignored until he needed it again.

Joe wasn't in the room with the others, which Ezra found strange. Running through the mental map he had been making of the air ducts, he couldn't have been more than two hundred feet away from the closet that he had been locked in. There had been plenty of time for Joe to join the others; he could have made it back and forth a handful of times even before Ezra had made his escape. He was beginning to accept that Joe hadn't betrayed him and dropped him off in some horrid place, so the detective had to be there  _somewhere._ If it wouldn't have given away his hiding place, Ezra would have called down to Barry and just asked where Joe was. The longer it took for them to learn that he used air vents as his own private shortcuts, though, the better.

In a matter of seconds, Joe came rushing into the wide room, his brow furrowed with a vague look of confused panic. "Did any of you let Ezra out?" he asked. The quartet glanced to one another, seeing if anybody would fess up; nobody did. "So then where is he? I locked him in a closet!"

That was Ezra's cue to leave. He scooted backwards as quietly as he could until he had enough space to turn around, and shuffled along to the next vent that led into a different room. He had to get out of the ducts quickly, just in case Joe and Barry's friends had scanners in their air conditioning system. A few quick pokes from his omnitool, and the vent detached from the ceiling. He pulled the vent cover in with him, and then dropped out of the duct, dragging the cover back down to cover his escape route. The screws would still be loose, but there wasn't much he could do about that. 

The room he landed in was small and dark, with but one exit, which was shut tight. The only thing actually  _in_  the room was a metal table straight out of Ezra's nightmares. It looked too similar to what his own government's officers used to try to  _convince_  their prisoners to give up every dirty secret they held. Just the sight of it sent shivers down his spine, and made his fingers twitch with the need to grab something to strike out with, just in case.

For a split second, he thought that somebody was already trapped on the table, bound by invisible restraints. It took just a blink to realize that the person he thought he saw was an empty suit. It was an awful thing, in Ezra's opinion; all red and yellow, with lightning bolts accenting the cowl and mask, and emblazoned on the center of the chest. It looked ridiculous, just laying there, and probably looked even more so when actually on someone's body. If Ezra owned such a travesty, he would probably lock it up in a dark room, too.

Confident that the table trapped nothing but the garish insult to fashion, he returned to his primary objective; escape the lab, track down the  _nastravan'aikos,_  and then...do something. Honestly, he wasn't entirely sure what his plan was, since killing people wasn't something he was really supposed to do.

_'But wait. I've killed people before.'_ Exploded things and cut things, and shot things until his targets were down and out and most certainly deader than dead. He had stunned and knocked people out more than he had straight-up killed, but he hadn't exactly avoided ending lives. 

That was during combat, though; during a war. Some part of him pointed out that this was kind of like a war, too; a war against those that were too poor or too mentally ill to live up to society's standards.  _'So maybe I'll just kill him.'_

Ezra eased the door to the room open and peered out into the wider room beyond. It was the same room that Barry, Joe, Caitlin, and those other two men had been in. He must have taken a wrong turn in the air ducts somewhere; he had thought that he had made it farther away from that room than just one over. In any case, the room had emptied, and everything was still and silent. A quick glance around the room for anything resembling a security camera revealed none, so Ezra slipped through the door and quietly pushed it closed with a click.

He focused and reached out, hoping that he would be able to feel any of the others and get an idea of where they were; the better he knew where they were, the better he could avoid them. He found what he assumed was the man in the wheelchair quickly, a chill rolling along far enough away that Ezra probably didn't have to worry about him. Sensing the wheelchair-bound man made his stomach flip with unease, as if he had gotten his hands on some rotten fruit or rancid meat. His heart leapt in his chest as if he had been startled, and an unpleasant taste hung at the back of his throat; like bile, but not quite. Ezra drew away from the wheelchair man almost completely, leaving just the barest amount of himself behind to keep tabs on his location.

The only other thing Ezra managed to sense was what had to be Barry; a mass of warmth, shining like a subtle light. It  _had_  to be Barry, because unlike most other people, Ezra couldn't tune Barry out. He was always there, blazing like a bonfire to everybody else's candle. Ezra couldn't be entirely sure that it was him, though, because he couldn't get a lock on the source of the heat. Every time he got close, it would dart away, bouncing around and rocketing off like a buzzing insect. After the third attempt to corner it and  _really_  examine it had failed, Ezra gave up on it, along with finding any of the others. The warmth eclipsed them all. 

At least he knew where the man with the wheelchair was. Ezra wanted to run into him the least.

Keeping his head down and his steps light, Ezra trotted out of the wide room, and into the curving hallway beyond. It went off in two directions, so with a shrug, he chose the path to the right and started down it. The going was boring, with most interesting-looking doors that led to promising offshoots locked or blocked. The place was incredibly empty for such a large building, as if it was abandoned. If Ezra hadn't seen or known better, he would have just assumed that it was. Maybe it had something to do with the massive amount of damage that the building boasted, both on the outside and the inside. One room--if Ezra could even call it that--was nothing but a cavernous, burnt crater, dropping down into the earth below with jagged outcroppings of deformed glass and twisted metal.

It was in that devastated room that Ezra felt it. He wasn't sure what "it" was, but like Barry, it refused to be ignored. It was a weak feeling, but it still reached out to him, beckoning, struggling to wrap around his limbs and paw at his soul. It was like a cat, twining around his legs as it asked for attention. It whined and whimpered like a beaten dog, too bloodied to move but dragging its limp body to him anyway. It whispered, asked,  _begged_  him for help, mewling pitifully from the bottom of that charred crater, from where the ground was sunken and replaced by a curving metal floor that tunneled through the dirt.

Ezra had no idea what it was, but he knew he wanted to find out.

He grabbed onto the dented railing before him, preparing to heave himself up and over to jump into the yawning crevice. A shout stopped him.

"Hey!"

His head snapped around, eyes locking on to the young man with shoulder-length dark hair and even darker eyes, and a skin tone similar to Ezra's own. It was the other unknown from the wide room, the one that  _hadn't_  been confined to a wheelchair. Now that he was closer, Barry didn't outshine his light. The young man felt kind, and witty, and a bit too smart for his own good. He felt like the kind of person that Ezra wouldn't mind trying to befriend, had he been back home and not actively trying to avoid contact with people.

Since Ezra could count on one hand the amount of people he had had an actual, proper conversation with in the past couple-hundred days, it was safe to assume that his socialization skills had become rather rusty. So rusty, in fact, that he decided that he was just going to charge through the young man, and make a run for it. The man stuttered something in rapid English that flew right over Ezra's head, the words blurring together too much for him to try and translate them. He figured the words didn't matter, since he was planning to ram into the man if he stepped into his path either way.

"Ezra!"

Even though it fell a little flat from the tongues of English-speakers,  _that_ one didn't need translation. 

Joe stood in one of the nearby doorways, chest heaving from what had probably been one hell of a sprint, and his face darkening from repressing what was sure to be a very impressive tirade.

_'Oh, he looks angry.'_

Ezra was angrier.

It took all of his mental power to spit Joe's language instead of his own. "You lock in closet!" He didn't try too hard to use good grammar, which was partially because he wanted to take his own petty revenge. People who locked others in closets without a word of explanation didn't  _get_  good grammar. They had to earn it. At that point, Joe hadn't.

"You can't go running around this place," Joe said. He was visibly straining to keep from yelling at Ezra and treating him like a disobedient child. Ezra didn't care. He couldn't have broken any rules when he hadn't been told what was going on in the first place. "I told you to stay put." Okay, so he had broken  _one_  rule. But then, Ezra wasn't a particularly good listener.

"You lock in  _closet!"_  he repeated. "Bring to  _batska_  base, bring to  _lab,"_  he spat the word with such venom that both Joe and the unknown man drew away from him. "Gave no words...think- I think- I  _thought-"_ He released a barking shout, fed up with the mad scramble through his brain for the words he wanted. _"Eke klelaklulam mjas pao kan ejas minolam da-kaumetha!"_

The resulting silence was partially because of the awkward pauses that always followed someone yelling, and partially because neither English-speaker knew how to follow up something that they couldn't understand.

Joe got the gist of it, though. It was kind of hard not to. He had been so caught up in wanting to find the Drifter Ripper and catching him that he hadn't thought about what he had done. He hadn't thought when he had pushed Ezra into the first empty room he had seen and locked the door; he had just done it. He had had good intentions--namely, making sure that he didn't drag Ezra past something he shouldn't see, like Barry's suit--but in the process he had forgotten that Ezra was practically a stranger.  _'A stranger,'_ he reminded himself,  _'that doesn't trust cops.'_  And a cop had just locked him in a small closet without a word of explanation. If he had been Ezra, he would have been pissed, too.

He wanted to apologize. He felt he  _needed_  to apologize, if Ezra was to ever trust him.

Ezra didn't know or care about Joe's thoughts. He was ready to leave. He had wasted enough time waiting around. He had a killer to find.

It wasn't Joe that stopped him this time, but the young man that, until that point, had been content with standing to the side and letting Ezra and Joe berate one another. 

"Can you, like, hang on for a sec?" the young man requested. Ezra had no idea what he was expected to hang on to. "You were the one that got cut up by the Freddy Krueger-wannabe, right?"

Ezra turned to Joe, relying on him for a translation. "The sharp man," the detective supplied.

"...yes?"

The young man grinned. "Okay, first of all? Totally badass. Second, I say you stick around and help us."

Ezra's lip curled. "Will not look at more  _takipavzem'kune-ra."_

Cisco looked expectantly at Joe, who sighed. "He means 'car'." Apparently this was his life now. "He's been at the CCPD all morning looking through pictures of cars to try and find the make and model of the one the killer drove."

"Yeah, that sounds lame and boring. I don't mean that stuff," Cisco said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I'm talking the cool stuff, using my beautiful,  _beautiful_  toys. Like my satellites and computers. Pool my tech with your knowledge, and we could catch this guy within a week, I bet!"

"Cisco," Joe growled out of the side of his mouth. "This doesn't seem like a good idea." 

Whatever warning Joe was trying to give, Cisco ignored it. "It'll be fine, Joe! It's a  _great_  idea! Ezra--it  _is_  Ezra, right?--is the only one to see this guy and live to tell about it, right? He knows what this guy looks like, what his car looks like, and probably has a good idea of what he can do. We can use that." He lowered his voice and spoke quickly, but Ezra picked up most of what he said. "And if he's as determined to find this guy as you say he is, we can help you keep an eye on him better if he's  _here."_ He resumed his normal cadence. "Barry and I were talking earlier about this. He agrees with me."

"That's not exactly persuasive."

"I will help," Ezra said, cutting in to the conversation that was rapidly turning away from the situation at hand. He looked to Cisco. "You have satellites?" 

"How do you know what satellites are, but I had to explain what a car was?"

Cisco nodded with a grin. "Oh, do we have satellites! They're pretty legit. Could watch two ants fighting over an M&M if I wanted to." He scoffed. "Who needs to pay for HBO when you can just watch  _Game of Thrones_  through some dude's window?" He paused, and glanced at Joe. "I can't get arrested for that, can I?"

"I will help you." Ezra locked eyes with Joe, his gaze firm, just daring the older man to challenge him and try to tell him that he couldn't. "Will find the sharp man."

"Hell yeah we will, you magnificent, grungy little blueberry!" 

Joe sighed. He knew when he was beat. And Cisco  _had_  made some good points, especially the one about having other people to keep an eye on Ezra to make sure he didn't go running face-first into a serial killer _again._ "Fine," he conceded, feeling as if him permitting it was an empty gesture, and that any denial would have gone ignored anyway. 

Cisco was immediately at Ezra's side, moving at a speed that would have turned Barry green with envy, throwing an arm around the shoulders of the _very_  unwilling teen. "Great! Now, how married are you to the name 'sharp man'? It's a nice first attempt, but it could be better." He led the two back down the hallways and towards the lab, babbling as he ushered Ezra along, who looked like he would rather rescind his offer.

He  _really_  had to start researching people before agreeing to help them.

"How about 'Handicide'? No, that sounds like an innuendo. Or 'Homiclaw', because his fingers are like claws?" Cisco gasped, a hand flying to his chest, his eyes widening. "THE HANDYMAN." Joe sighed and rubbed his face, and Ezra just looked confused. "None of you can appreciate  _true genius_ , I see."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry it's taken, like, all summer to get this chapter to you guys. I swear I'm not abandoning this fic. It's not my most popular, but this shit right here is a labor of love, people. My life is just stupid backwards, where my summer is zero free time while the school year is where I can actually get crap done. The next chapter might not be out until mid-August, but it's definitely coming, so keep an eye out! Get hyped, because stuff is finally starting to happen!
> 
> ALSO! Would you guys want a Galactic Basic dictionary? It'd be a separate "story", put into a collection with this one. You could ignore it if you'd like, but if you're really wondering what Ezra's saying, it'd be there for you. It'd just be individual word translations, maybe some basic grammar rules, and then a chapter-by-chapter translation of whatever the hell Ezra's saying. Lemme know your guy's opinion on a Basic dictionary, okay? Nice. Thanks!


	8. "I'll wing it. It'll be fine." Or, the One Where Ezra Wings It and Nothing Is Fine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read the note at the end thanks :)))))

Ezra was acting strangely. 

Of course, Joe hadn't exactly known him for a long enough time to know what was normal and what wasn't for the boy, but he found the young teen's behavior strange just based on principle.

Ezra always seemed like an overly-cautious individual, which made sense considering his apparent lifestyle. He shied away from being in close proximity to anyone, his shoulders grew rigid when he was surrounded by any more than two people, and he instinctively ducked out of range if anybody so much as raised their arm near him. His cop brain--and his  _father_  brain--couldn't help but form theories as to the reason why that was, and he liked none of the conclusions that he drew. "Abuse of all varieties" came to mind the quickest, with "abandoned in a foreign country" coming in at a close second. "War refugee" also registered as a blip on his radar.

None of those things really explained the seemingly random distaste Ezra had for Doctor Wells.

The wheelchair-bound man had been nothing but cordial upon returning to the Cortex, where Ezra had been looking around with a critical eye at all of the computer monitors, and ignoring the medical bed with rugged determination. Wells's attempts to introduce himself went horribly. Ezra refused to get close enough to him to shake his proffered hand. He finally gave Wells his name, and accepted the doctor's name in turn, but only after Joe had given him a short yet stern talking-to about manners, which Ezra had looked none too pleased about. Once Joe thought about it later, he realized that Ezra had probably only gone through the introductions so as to avoid being reprimanded again, and not because he took any lasting lessons away from his lecture.

Even after that, though, Ezra still kept a wide berth between himself and the doctor. If Wells wheeled too close to wherever Ezra was, the boy would get an odd look on his face--one part nausea, one part discomfort, and one part tension, garnished with a dash of confusion--before picking himself up to shuffle over to a different part of the room, becoming suddenly interested in little bits of technology and requesting that Cisco show him how they worked. His impromptu education in most of the computers didn't get much further than the beginning stages, considering Ezra knew absolutely nothing about written English--aside from the numbers, strangely enough--but then again, Joe supposed that Ezra didn't  _actually_  care about how to operate half of the stuff.

It was perhaps twenty minutes into Cisco, Barry, and Ezra combing through footage from a satellite, searching for any signs of what could have been the killer metahuman's car, when Wells drew his attention with a tilt of his head and a pointed gesture of his eyes. Joe followed the other man into the treadmill room, where he nudged the door closed behind him. 

"Something wrong?" Joe asked, quirking an eyebrow. 

Wells, for a moment, peered out the window and back into the Cortex, his expression unreadable as Cisco jabbed excitedly at the screen, and Ezra shook his head with some short, unheard comment that left both Cisco and Barry frowning with disappointment.

"You remember General Wade Eiling." 

On reflex, Joe's back straightened, and the muscles in his jaw became taught. It had been less of a question and more of a statement, but he said anyway, "Yes, I do."

Wells pursed his lips. "I've been... _keeping an eye_  on Eiling when I can. All perfectly legal, I assure you."

"Right." Joe rolled his eyes. "And he's done something to draw your attention?"

"In a way. He's been poking around the bay."

Joe's forehead wrinkled as he raised an eyebrow. "Is that supposed to mean something?" 

The stare Wells offered was unsettling. "I don't know. You tell me." Joe shrugged in response, and Wells huffed out a breath; less of a sigh and more of a sound of displeased acceptance. "I figured whatever Eiling is working on is being kept under wraps well enough that your department wouldn't have heard anything, but..." But he had still hoped. Joe could understand that. "I'd like to think that whatever he's doing is benign, but considering his track record...you can understand why I am feeling cautious."

Joe jerked his head in a brisk nod. "You sure this doesn't have anything to do with Sans Souci?" he asked. He was grasping at straws, and he knew it. The tragedy surrounding Bette Sans Souci had reached its foreseeable end nearly two months ago; not necessarily a lot of time, but enough that anything Eiling would have been doing would have been noticed long before now, if not already completed. 

As predicted, Wells shook his head. "I can't be sure, but I doubt it. The area they're searching isn't anywhere near where she was shot, nor where her body detonated afterwards."

So a different location.  _Great._  That meant they probably had no way to predict what the scheming, smarmy general was up to. "What part of the bay are we talking here?"

"The southern end, near Cooper's Point." 

That didn't really narrow any of the possibilities down. The water there was particularly deep, and the currents rushed around it so chaotically that anybody not experienced in sailing in the area would be beached or dashed against the cliff face. Its distance from the docks and the rest of the city made it a lovely place for couples to park their cars and try to get glimpses of the stars with less light pollution in the way, but because of the torrential and vanishing characteristics of the water surrounding the point, it was less of a "Lover's Lookout" and more of a place for budding serial killers to hide their kills. 

Joe doubted that  _that_  was what Eiling was doing there, but he still wouldn't be surprised if that was what it turned out to be.

"I'll let a few hints "slip" to my Captain," Joe said. "Get somebody stationed out there to keep an eye on things." Stationed far enough away that Eiling wouldn't think to interfere, preferably. 

Wells paused, the muscles in his jaw rolling as he ground his teeth and thought. He had just opened his mouth to speak when the door was thrown open and Cisco leaned halfway into the room.

"Uh...we might have a problem?"

Joe sighed.

"What did Ezra do now?"

"Um. Nothing? Technically?" Cisco wrung his hands together. "He's just...he kinda left?"

Joe and Wells blinked. Joe twitched.

"He  _what?!"_

* * *

He had him. Ezra  _had him._  Finally, after _who knew how long searching_ , he had found him. The Sharp Man, the  _nastravan'aikos,_  the Ripper--whatever anybody wanted to call him. 

Ezra had  _found him._

Kind of.

He hadn't found him  _physically_  yet, because there was still a lot of running and walking between him and the  _nastravan'aikos,_  but he had a location to go to now. They had found the killer's car using Cisco's satellites, and then followed the car along its path, out of the city and through the winding streets that connected clusters of houses. Ezra was already familiar with those streets; he had spent days upon days wandering them, hoping to find the  _takipavzem'kune_  that had carried his target away from him.

But then the feed from the satellite had cut out, turning into a sharp jumble of static and a shaky picture just long enough for the vehicle to vanish. Cisco had said that the satellite had been hit by the residual energy from a solar flare or something. Ezra hadn't really been listening too closely; he chalked the interference up to being caused by "a rude inconvenience" and left it at that.

He had more important things to concern himself with.

Because, right before the video had cut out, Ezra had seen the  _takipavzem'kune_  turn down one of the few streets that he hadn't yet searched; one with only five houses placed along its path.

If he ran-- _really_  ran--he could make it to those houses in under an hour. And after that, screw the consequences, he was kicking each and every door down until he found the  _nastravan'aikos,_  and did whatever he was intending to do. He still hadn't figured that part out yet, but he trusted his instincts to tell him when it came to that point.

Boy was Joe going to be  _livid_ when Cisco or Barry noticed that he had ducked out when they had been too preoccupied by the distorted video.

He made even better time than he had been expecting; maybe thirty-five minutes after he had ducked out of S.T.A.R. Labs, he leaned against a tree at the entrance to the neighborhood that hid the  _nastravan'aikos._  He was there, Ezra could  _feel it._  The city was so full of people and animals and  _emotions_  that it was hard to track anything there, but out in the suburbs, where the people and buildings were more spread out, it was almost too easy to find the Ripper. And after the night where Ezra had confronted him, there was no way he could be mistaken for anyone else. 

Ezra strode down the street until he had a clear line of sight to each house. Only then did he pause, his breath still quickened from his long sprint, adrenaline making all his muscles twitch in anticipation. He forced his breathing to even out, taking long, slow pulls of air, even though it made his chest feel tight and his vision dim around the edges. He closed his eyes, and as he breathed out again, he also pushed all of his senses outwards, reaching with focused waves of intent towards the five houses. 

The sensation was a hard one to describe. He had tried to before; tried to put words to something that was all feeling and emotion and  _just knowing,_ so that others could try to understand. The best he had ever come up with was something that had come to him after he had been awake for two days straight, and consumed approximately half of his weight in caffeine. 

It was bit like swimming. The water was a light pressure that didn't really  _change_ , but he could still tell when there was something solid near him, like a big boulder in a lake, or the wall of the pool. If he pushed in that direction, gentle waves would eventually return to him.  _Living things,_  though...they created their own waves. He only had to hold still and pay attention.

The houses were like the walls of the pool. He could inexplicably just sense that they were there; big inanimate things that broke up wind currents and sound. When he pushed at them, the waves worked a bit different then water, as they both gently returned to him and kept going through the houses, the feeling of which was a bit harder to explain. More violent waves hit him too; little blips on his radar that had their own origin. All but one of the houses had these clusters of churning sensation in varying numbers; people, going about their day.

But only one of those houses sent out waves that made his skin itch all over and something in his gut flop around in displeasure. 

The little powder-blue house on the left, the only one with the garage shut tight, hiding whatever was inside.

Ezra's eyes snapped open, and he bared his teeth in a feral grin. "Got you,  _makamobre._ "

Getting into the house was child's play. The types of security systems Ezra had grown up cracking and fooling were leaps and bounds more difficult than a tumbler lock and a few sheets of glass. For one, these were physical objects instead of electric panels and complicated, semi-sentient computers, which meant that a bit of focus and a purposeful  _nudge_  had them scrambling to move out of his way.

He chose a dormer at the back of the house as his point of entry. A controlled leap carried him up to the roof, which he tiptoed across in a crouch, all of his senses sweeping the area around him. One little push at the lock of the dormer's window and it popped right open.

The inside of the house was disarmingly normal, so much so that Ezra paused while easing the window closed behind him and double-checked to make sure that he hadn't accidentally broken into the wrong house. He hadn't been expecting to find blood oozing down the walls, but he also hadn't considered that the house might look like any other that he had sneaked through before.

Muffled voices reverberating from downstairs drew his attention away from his inspection of the room. Right, he had a purpose for breaking in; one that went beyond his usual reasoning of needing warmer clothes or something to eat. 

It was  _voices_ , though, not just one voice, which threw Ezra for a loop. He hadn't noticed a second person in the house before. Of course, he hadn't really been  _looking_  for one, and had just zeroed in on what he knew to be the  _nastravan'aikos_. Now that he was actually paying attention, he could feel the waves of another person; warped like the first, which was just perfect. He hadn't thought that anybody would be willing to be friendly with a...what had Iris called him again? A  _serial killer._

Ezra crouched and leaned back on his heels at the top of the stairs, tucking himself away behind the corner of the wall before peaking down at the floor below.

The  _nastravan'aikos_  sat at his kitchen table, his chin resting on his fist while he watched with disinterest as another man paced back in forth in front of him. While Ezra's target looked bored, this new man looked  _livid_ , his face so red it was starting to bleed purple, the veins on his forehead and neck bulging and straining underneath his skin. Rage swirled around the man like a thick fog, churned up by his pacing, and making Ezra's nose and throat burn. That man had powerful anger; more powerful than most people could manage. It was nowhere near the worst Ezra had ever felt, but it was certainly up there.

The man was ranting almost too quickly for Ezra to keep up, the words flying from his mouth in that particular way that only happened when someone was so unbelievably pissed, that they didn't even have to think to strings words together anymore. A lot of what he said didn't make sense. Scratch that;  _most_  of what he said didn't make sense, and not just because Ezra didn't understand a good third of the words he used.

"You were  _ordered_  not to engage!" the man snarled, lip curling as he stalked circles around the kitchen table. "We're not even  _close_ to being ready for a counteroffensive, let alone an outright offensive, and you go and try to instigate an attack? Our defenses, Jones, our  _defenses!_ They are pitiful, not nearly up to par with what  _they_  could throw at us! I knew I shouldn't have let you operate unchecked. It's bad enough that your personal vendetta against the homeless has been drawing more and more attention, but then you go and do  _this?_  I don't even know why I bother with you!"

"Uh, because I'm one of the only ones that actually listens to your crackpot theories?" the  _nastravan'aikos_  replied once the new man paused to heave in a breath. "And he had it coming. They _all_ do. Dirty vagrants, living off the hard work of others and forcing us decent folk to see their putrid excuse of an existence...they're good for nothing, and they're  _dangerous._  Turn your back on them for even a second, and they'll come at you with a knife and try to steal your shit. And  _please,_  as if all this crap you're doing isn't a vendetta, too."

"It's not a vendetta, Jones, it's  _survival!"_

"Yeah, once you provide even a  _shred_  of proof of the bullshit you're claiming, _then_  I'll believe you, Hall."

"That's  _'General'!"_

"Would you knock that crap off? You've never even been in the military."

The man slammed his hand down on the table with a resounding _bang,_  the  _nastravan'aikos_  jumping and turning towards him with wide, startled eyes. The moment their eyes locked, the  _nastravan'aikos_ slumped in his chair, his shoulders drooping and face becoming vacant. 

"Forgive me, General," he intoned.

"You'll have your proof," the new man growled, "just as soon as I can find someone  _actually_ _competent_  that can help me pull that thing from the bay."

What was a bay again? A type of grass? No, that was hay. 'Bay' was a type of tree. Iris had talked about its leaves being used as an herb when she had given him a crash course in cooking, most of which had gone right over his head. What had these idiots gotten stuck in a tree?

Back towards the city the distant wails of sirens rose, growing stronger with each swell of noise. Ezra had become incredibly familiar with that sound, and his heart leaped into his throat out of reflex. They were coming for him, no doubt, although this time he was fairly certain it was less to capture him for doing something against the rules, and more because he was squatting in a serial killer's house. While Joe was certain to be with them and probably on a warpath, the  _batska-ra_  were definitely more interested in the  _nastravan'aikos,_ which would have been good for him if he was simply trying to slip away unnoticed. But that wasn't his goal, and his window of opportunity was rapidly closing.

Ezra hurled himself over the stair railing and hit the ground in a dead sprint, flinging himself at the  _nastravan'aikos_  while he was still frozen in confusion from his unexpected entrance. The table was between him and his target, but Ezra didn't let that stop him; he grabbed the edge of the table with one hand, picked it up clear off of the floor, and flung it to the opposite end of the kitchen as if it was made of paper. 

The serial killer brought his hands up, curling his fingers to claw the air. "Hall, that's-" Ezra didn't let him finish, nor did he let him get those damned hands anywhere near him. Bending to brace one hand against the floor, Ezra kicked out with both legs like an irate donkey, slamming one foot into the front of the chair's seat, and the other directly into the serial killer's chest.

The resulting chaos was comparable to the  _nastravan'aikos_  being launched out of a cannon. Part of his chair splintered with the crunch of wood as he and it tumbled backwards and straight through the glass of his sliding back door, his body skipping and rolling across his backyard for a good dozen feet.

One  _nastravan_  down--for the moment, anyway--and one to go.

The other warped man hadn't moved from where he had recoiled against the cabinets when Ezra had come charging into the kitchen. His spine went ramrod straight when Ezra's attention turned onto him, his Adam's apple bobbing and lips trembling. 

Ezra raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. The man had seemed much more confident facing down a serial killer than he was facing down a kid.

This new  _nastravan_  suddenly seemed to regain his earlier bravado, stepping away from the cabinets and brushing off his jacket; as if he had done anything to get dirt on it, just standing there while his acquaintance was punted out the back door. Then, with a confident gleam in his eyes, he turned his attention on Ezra.

The moment they locked eyes, it felt  _wrong;_  like something was trying to root around in Ezra's head. It made his knees weak and throat constrict, and he swore his eyes were trying to crawl upwards through the top of his head, pushing his brain against the walls of his skull in a bid for more room. It was as if the strange sensation he got from being around other warped people had been cranked all the way up to twenty; like the abnormality of their existence had gotten tired of him ignoring it, and had decided that the best way to get his attention was to burrow into his body and try his limbs on for size.

A whispering voice slithered through his head, crawling in one ear and wrapping around his thoughts like a snake, constricting until he felt like his mind might suffocate. "We know all about what you and yours are planning," it said. "You won't get away with it. You won't win." The voice reared back, dragging him right along with it. It grinned, the expression full of millions of teeth like needles. "We may not be ready now, but when the time comes,  _we will be,"_  the voice hissed, right before sinking its fangs into everything that he was.

An overwhelming  _need_  flooded into him, filling him up from his toes to the crown of his head. It was a powerful desire, an instinctual pull in all directions; sit down and give up  _everything,_  grab a knife from that block and slice open his belly, march down to the ocean so that he could go in and find the proof that this man needed--

An engine roared to life and tires squealed on asphalt, the sound like a battering ram to Ezra's awareness. 

He told himself that his shaking was intentional, to throw off the lest vestiges of the trance that hadn't been chased off by the sudden noise. It was an awful lie.

He hadn't even realized that he had sunk to his knees, but there he was on the kitchen floor, the chill from the linoleum seeping through his jeans. His arms were up as if to defend himself from some invisible threat, the heels of his palms digging into his temples with a vengeance. There was nothing for him to protect himself from though; the voice had quieted, the feeling of wrongness had left, and that new  _nastravan_  was gone. Ezra was alone.

Outside, the sirens drew nearer.

Ezra swore, and hauled himself up off of the floor. He could figure things out later, like when he wasn't about to be caught in a serial killer's house, or when his target wasn't missing from the backyard he was supposed to be incapacitated in. He leaped over the shattered remains of the back door and jogged around the side of the house, head snapping back and forth in search of the  _nastravan'aikos._ And there he was, or rather there the was  _takipavzem'kune,_  peeling off down the road with its back end swinging wildly. 

Ezra took off after the car at a dead sprint, arms and legs pumping, bruised ribs protesting each jarring footfall. Cars, he had learned through his travels, could move  _fast,_ but he was used to things that moved faster, things that were more maneuverable and weren't confined to the ground. Cars couldn't go over bigger obstacles, had to slow down drastically to get around corners, and didn't accelerate very quickly. Compared to some of the vehicles Ezra had had to chase down on foot before, this box of metal and plastic was pitiful.

Ezra kept with the  _nastravan'aikos on_  the winding neighborhood streets, vaulting over cars parked on curbs and hurtling across lawns at corners. Once the car swerved out onto the main road, with nothing in the car's way to slow it down and a stitch burning in his side, Ezra began to lag behind. Maybe five hundred yards ahead of them, the road bent around in a sharp curve to meet an old bridge that spanned a slow, lazy creek; beyond that, the road remained straight and flat as far as Ezra could see. If the  _nastravan'aikos_ got across that bridge, there would be no catching him. What he wouldn't give for his own vehicle, so he could just run the man off the road.

Actually, that wasn't that bad of an idea.

Ezra slowed to a stop, each breath a shot of pain straight to his side, his bandaged arm throbbing with its own tiny heartbeat. As he struggled to regain control of his breathing, he watched with rapt attention as the car screeched around the curve and rocketed onward. The moment the  _nastravan'aikos_ reached the bridge, the pride at losing his determined tail clear on his face even from so far away, Ezra reared an arm back and let it fly in a wicked right cross that would have made any boxer proud.

On the bridge, the car jerked and rolled, the passenger side crumpling in a screaming crunch of metal, struck by some invisible force with all the strength of a stampeding elephant. The car tumbled right over the side of the bridge, glass exploding outwards with a sound like shattering ice when it hit the ground on its roof. It rocked forwards on its windshield once, twice, and then came to a halt, its front bumper just barely dipping into the creek that just went right on babbling, unconcerned by everything happening around it.

Ezra paused, watching the cabin of the car for any sign that the  _nastravan'aikos_ was planning on climbing out. He still  _felt_ him in the car, so he wasn't dead, but he wasn't sliding out to charge him in an attempt to take revenge for his destroyed car either. 

_"Syastra,"_ Ezra congratulated himself, his tone pleased, but still falling a bit flat because now that he had the  _nastravan'aikos,_ he had to  _do_ something about him. Running on knee-jerk reactions had gotten him this far, but the sirens had fallen silent, and his target didn't seem to be making an effort to fight back. He could  _really_ think through his options now.  _'Maybe he's in a coma,'_ Ezra thought, gingerly picking his way down to the bank of the creek, his uninjured arm wrapped protectively around his rib cage. He felt like he pulled something. Was pulling a rib even possible?  _'If he's in a coma, that'd solve so many problems._  

Thirty feet away from the overturned car, Ezra froze, an itch that was quickly growing familiar crawling across his skin, a comforting but also awkward pressure poking at the base of his skull. Heat blossomed at his back, burning away the itch as it grew hotter by the nanosecond, the pressure in his head glowing with a blinding light. On instinct, or perhaps based on some ingrained habit, Ezra swung his arm behind him in an arch, reaching for whatever was coming at him like a bullet. His fingers, for the briefest moment, grazed the tightly-woven threads of a coarse cloth, but then the thing was gone, bringing with it its heat and light and whispering presence in his mind. 

He was alone again.

He tentatively reached out, probing the area around him for anything that his eyes might not be able to see. With his luck, there would be another new  _nastravan,_ this one a  _nastravan'nevorat;_ someone with the power to hide in plain sight. But no, there was nobody. He was well and truly alone, the presence gone.

_'This place is so_ weird.' A thought wormed its way to the front of his mind, wagging a finger at him.  _'Wait a minute.'_ He reached out again, sweeping the area. Nothing. He was alone. 

There was nobody in the car; the  _nastravan'aikos_ was gone.

_"Vali?"_ He jogged over to the car and bent down, peering at all the nooks and crannies big enough to fit a full grown man. His eyes confirmed what he had already felt; the car was empty.  _"Ine."_ He repeated the denial again and again, circling the car, checking for any signs of his target that he knew he wouldn't find. It was as if the man had just vanished into thin air.  _"Ine!"_ He kicked the dented side of the car with a frustrated growl, which only served to make his toes ache instead of making him feel any better.  _"Gama ro mvastri!"_

Next time, he was just going to punch the man's car into orbit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god I suck. "I'll update in August!" It's almost October, you goon. I'm sorry, guys. This semester is dumb. I'm not dead, though, so updates will still be happening!
> 
> ALSO HEY. GUYS. I talked about this last chapter, but I'll keep mentioning it until I get some opinions. So, would you guys want a Galactic Basic dictionary? It'd be a separate "story", put into a collection with this one. You'd be able to ignore it if you'd like, but if you're wondering what Ezra's been saying, it'd be there for you. It'd have individual word translations, MAYBE some basic grammar rules, and then a chapter-by-chapter translation of the Galactic Basic that appears. I won't bother putting a dictionary up unless people want it, though, so LET ME KNOW. Otherwise, y'all will never know what "gama ro mvastri" ACTUALLY means (Hint: Ezra swears a lot more than you realize) :))))))


	9. "Barry is the WHAT?" Or, the One Where Ezra Finally Connects Some Dots

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Real quick, I've uploaded the translation dictionary thing! I put it in a series with this one so you could find it easier. Go ahead and check it out, if you'd like! It's accurate up until this chapter.

_"No, he's not back yet,"_  Caitlin's tinny voice echoed up from Cisco's phone. _"He should have a passenger, so he'll probably take-- ...oh. No, he's back. And he's bleeding."_  The call crackled, metal instruments clattering against the floor on the other end.

Joe's grip tightened on the steering wheel as he navigated the streets flooded with police cruisers. When the majority of all available units volunteered to go to the house of a serial killer, all protocol for keeping the streets at least marginally passable went out the window, apparently. It was just one man--a metahuman, sure, but not like anybody else knew that--so was there  _really_  a need for not one, but  _two_ SWAT vans? That seemed like overkill.

"Is he okay?" Joe asked.

_"Yeah, he's fine. He heals fast now, remember? He's just got a little cut. Or three."_ Caitlin paused, the mumbles of a second voice cutting her off. _"...Barry would like you all to know that he has four cuts, but not to worry. Oh, and that Timothy Jones-"_

_"The Handyman!"_

_"-is unhappily settling in to his new home in the Pipeline."_  

Cisco pumped his fist, overjoyed. "Nice! Another win for Team Flash!"

_"He killed at least fifteen people, Cisco."_  

"And he's not going to be facing  _legal_  punishment for his actions for a long time," Joe added, because he was still not happy about that. Although getting locked in a tiny box in an underground, abandoned pipe was just what he deserved, so maybe Joe wasn't  _that_ upset.

"Okay, so  _neutral ending_  for Team Flash? Can I get three cheers for 'It Could Always Be Worse'? Hip hip!"

Joe talked right over Barry's distant but dutiful response of "Hooray" echoing through Cisco's phone, asking, "Caitlin, did Barry say if he saw Ezra anywhere?"

More mumbling. _"He said to check the bridge on Clark. The one over Mill Creek. Ezra was there when he picked up Jones."_

The conflicting feelings of relief, concern, and the lasting remnants of anger made Joe's head hurt. "He didn't see Barry, did he?"

Caitlin repeated the question to Barry, her voice muffled. After a moment of silence, she said, "...he did  _what?"_

"Caitlin?"

_"Barry said--hey! Barry, give that-"_ Caitlin's voice cut out, replaced with the sound of howling wind and crackling electricity. That, too, cut out after a moment, and was replaced with Barry's chipper, faux-innocent chirp. 

_"Hi, Joe. Sup, Cisco. You two at the bridge yet?"_

"Barry, what's going on?"

"Yeah, man. Did you just steal Caitlin's phone?"

_"Yep."_

Cisco shook his head. "Wherever you ran, it won't be far enough, dude."

Joe thumped at the dashboard, the hollow  _bang_  quieting Cisco and Barry right down. "Boys, focus. Barry, what happened?"

_"Don't worry about it, Joe. Just go get Ezra. He looked like his ribs were bothering him."_  That sounded like a not-so-subtle evasion, but Barry had a point. That, and they were rapidly approaching the bridge over Mill Creek. 

"We'll be talking about this later." Joe's tone left no room for discussion. 

_"If Caitlin hasn't already killed me and hidden the body, sure."_  

Cisco chattered an overenthusiastic reply before hanging up and sliding his phone back into his pocket. He peered out his window at the empty bridge as they approached the turn onto it. "He did say _this_  bridge, right?" he asked. "I don't see Ezra." They couldn't have been more than ten minutes behind Barry, but Cisco was right; Ezra was nowhere to be seen. Joe knew that the kid had a remarkable knack for disappearing at the drop of a hat, but that had always been when he had somewhere to hide, something to cover his escape. This far out of town, everything around them was flat, undeveloped plots of land, clear of everything but shin-high grass that only the truly desperate would lie down to hide in because of the likelihood of flattening a snake. Ezra couldn't be  _that_ serious about hiding from him.

Something caught Joe's eye as they approached the bridge; a thin trail of white smoke, lazily curling up towards the clouds from somewhere beyond the bridge. Whatever it was coming from was blocked by the bridge, but it  _did_  draw his attention to the dent in the guardrail on the far side, smears of dark paint outlining the deep gouges in the metal. Joe had seen things like that before; accidents on highways and other bridges, where cars had collided with the guardrails. 

It could have just been a coincidence. But coincidences didn't really exist in their lives anymore.

Joe pulled his car over on the side of the road and hopped out before Cisco could even undo his seat belt. He jogged to the side of the bridge and peeked over the edge, tracking the smoke all the way down to where it leaked from the front of an upended car that was just a foot or two shy of taking a dip in the creek. One side of the sedan was beaten to all hell, like a rhino had charged directly into it. The driver side was marginally better, the doors dented and scraped partially clean of paint from where it had hit the guardrail before being flipped up and over. 

And right next to it, kicking what remained of one of the headlights and yelling in that particular language of his, was the boy that Joe had been looking for.

"Ezra!"

The kid's head snapped up, the anger that creased his brow almost immediately replaced by denial and just a pinch of instinctual fear. 

_"Ejas ne-kanalam toa!"_  he barked quickly, the words flying from his lips even before his eyes had focused in on Joe. Once they had, he glanced back at the car, and then returned his gaze to the detective with the most innocent look he could muster. "Did not do it?" he offered in the worst conviction Joe had ever heard in his entire life.

"Dude!" Cisco said, face split between giant grin and astounded gasp. Dropping his voice, he whispered, "Barry didn't say he ran the Handyman off the road. What's your theory? I'm thinking 'aliens'." 

Joe ignored him. "Ezra, get up here!" Before the car decided to explode, preferably.

Ezra, like all teenagers, looked incredibly displeased at being ordered around by an adult. His jaw set, he turned his back on the two on the bridge, eyes sweeping the rocky creek bank. He must not have found whatever he was looking for, because he bit out something that was definitely a muffled swear, and then kicked a fist-sized rock a good thirty feet.

"Ezra!"

The blue-eyed teenager shot him a scathing glare, but finally relented and scrambled up the embankment to join Cisco and Joe on the bridge. "Had him!" Ezra snapped. "Sharp man  _here_ , in  _there."_  He jabbed a finger towards the overturned car. "Gone!"

Cisco and Joe exchanged a quick look, because how were they supposed to explain their way out of this one? The other cops trusted Joe enough that a clap on the back and a  _"Well that was weird, huh?"_  would be good enough for them, but Ezra had proven himself to not be that willing to just go along with whatever.

Joe's best idea for a distraction was to yell, so he just did that. "What the hell were you thinking?" he snapped. "This guy is a _killer,_  Ezra, one that already tried to kill you once before!"

Ezra took the bait; hook, line, and sinker. "Had location! Not let him get away again."

"But he  _did,"_  Joe said. "He got away again. Maybe he wouldn't have if you hadn't run off and tried to get him yourself."

Ezra opened his mouth, ready to argue. But he paused, jaw hanging open, his eyebrows lowering slowly into a frown. His mouth shut with the hollow  _click_  of teeth.  _"Eke trean ro toda da-kana ro feno'kal,"_  he muttered to himself, like he was quoting from a book. He shook his head.  _"Ejas bes-letao samono za dolmar'lago._  You are right. Probably."

Ezra's sudden willingness to agree threw Joe for a moment. If only he knew what the hell the kid was saying.

Owl-eyed, Cisco slid between them. "We'll have another chance to catch the Handyman. Later. But  _now_  we should probably get out of here." Both Joe and Ezra looked at him, blinking uncomprehendingly. Through gritted teeth, Cisco said, "Or we could stay here and explain to the rest of the CCPD why the Handyman's car is flipped over in a creek."

_My foster son ran it off the road using his super-speed_ ; not exactly a feasible answer that they could give.

"Yeah, we should-" Joe cut himself off when he turned to Ezra, only to find him missing.

"We go!" Ezra called from his place next to Joe's car. He bounced on his toes in an impatient little dance, eyes darting back towards where Jones's house was. "Now!"

At least there would be no arguments this time. 

* * *

"Where's Ezra?" Barry demanded the moment Joe and Cisco walked into the Cortex, springing off of the hospital bed that Caitlin had definitely forced him onto. "Where is he? Is he okay?"

"Whoa, dude, chill," Cisco laughed. "You might want to sit down. Caitlin's giving you the stink eye."

"Ezra's with Iris, at Jitters. They have English lessons there almost every day, apparently. She's the one that's been teaching him."

Caitlin's eyebrows raised. "Didn't you say that they met only a few weeks ago?"

"A little under two months, according to Iris."

"Impressive progress."

Joe wasn't sure if that was supposed to be a compliment for his daughter or for Ezra, but he felt secondhand pride for both of them anyway.

Barry raised a hand in the air as if he was a schoolboy requesting permission to go to the restroom. "Can we focus on something more important?" he asked. "Like how Ezra looked like somebody punched him when I saw him? I'm pretty sure he tried to chase Jones's car down. He might have hurt himself.  _Re-hurt_  himself."

Caitlin's eyes widened, her head snapping back and forth between the resident speedster and the two new arrivals. "Nobody told me about that."

"Hey, we  _tried_  to get him to come back," Cisco said, holding his hands up in surrender, "but he didn't want to. Like,  _really_  didn't want to. His aversion to anything medical makes my fear of needles look like a mild dislike." Considering last time Cisco had come within five feet of a needle he had passed out, that was a rather powerful statement. It wasn't necessarily untrue, either. Unlike Cisco, who had been confined to the back of the car when the subject had been brought up, Joe had had a front row seat to the terror that had flashed across Ezra's face. Joe was a bit surprised the kid hadn't tried to throw himself out of the vehicle. "He said something in his language that I'm thinking was a dig about my hair and then asked us to drop him at Jitters because of all of the English lessons he's missed."

"And you just let him?" Caitlin demanded. "He could be seriously hurt, Cisco."

"I think he's fine," Joe said. Like hell he would have dropped Ezra off without being at least mostly sure that he wasn't going to keel over and start vomiting blood. A quarter of a century of raising two kids had made him quite proficient at detecting absolute bullshit. "Besides, there's a discussion to be had, remember?" He turned his attention on Barry with a vengeance, who shrunk away as if he was already being scolded. "You said something earlier that surprised Caitlin. Did Ezra see you run Jones's car off the road?" That wouldn't necessarily be an issue even if he did--Barry wore a mask for a reason--but it was still something Joe would rather avoid.

Barry frowned, snapping back upright like a loosed rubber band. "Did he see me-- what? No. I didn't run the car off the road, guys. It was already like that when I got there."

"That doesn't make any sense," Cisco protested. "An average sedan weighs over four thousand pounds. You know how hard you'd have to hit a sedan to make it jump up and over a guardrail instead of just tearing through it? And I didn't see any other smashed cars that could have reached a high enough velocity to achieve that kind of impact force."

Barry shrugged. "It wasn't me," he reaffirmed.

The group fell silent. Then, "Maybe Ezra's telekinetic," Cisco joked, breaking the awkward silence and earning a few laughs and grins. "So what actually happened, then?"

"Um." Barry frowned, trying to put his thoughts to words. He waved a hand through the air in a vague gesture that nobody could put a name to. "Ezra kind of...tried to grab me."

The uproar that followed that declaration was deafening, one shouted question piling up on the next to create a wall of sound. _"Why were you standing still enough to let him?"_  was the most popular of the bunch.

"I  _wasn't,"_  Barry said. "I mean, I wasn't really going  _that_  fast-" if one could call one hundred fifty miles an hour "not that fast", "-but I was still  _moving._  I tried to run past him, grab Jones, and get back here. But when I was passing Ezra by, he just...reached a hand out." Like he was swatting a fly. "He was, like, an  _inch_  from grabbing onto my arm."

"That's not possible," Caitlin said, shaking her head. "His reaction speed would have to be off the charts, not to mention his  _physical_  speed, and-" Caitlin paused halfway through her sentence. "He wasn't in Central City during the accident, was he?"

All eyes turned to Joe, who had apparently been unanimously elected the resident Ezra-expert. Instead of showing a mastery of his knowledge of all things Ezra, Joe shrugged. "I don't even know if he was in  _America_  during the accident," he said. "But I think we'd know if there had been more than one person struck by lightning that night."

"The Man in the Yellow Suit wasn't struck by lightning," Barry said. "At least, not on the night of the particle accelerator explosion." Because Joe was right; they  _would_  know if someone else had been hit by lightning. "There might be more than one way to become a speedster."

"Wouldn't he heal as fast as Barry?" Cisco asked. "You heal broken bones in a matter of hours. It's been over a day since he got hurt, and he hasn't healed."

"He could be faking?" suggested Caitlin, but Joe shot her down.

"I saw him change the bandages on his arm this morning. It barely even looked scabbed over." If anything, Ezra seemed to be healing  _slower_  than the average person. "Call it a fluke for now." It wouldn't be the first time that somebody had basically gotten in a lucky hit on Barry, so it wasn't exactly impossible. "I'll keep an eye on him, though. If he's got powers, he'll slip up eventually, right?" Maybe if Ezra was a metahuman, that would explain his evasiveness. Maybe it could even explain why he was living on the streets, rather than with his parents.

Maybe that would explain a lot of things.

* * *

Everything went back to normal. Timothy Jones was declared a fugitive from the law, Joe went back to dreading the next time a metahuman decided to rear his or her head, and Barry went back to racing around the city with S.T.A.R. Labs at his back. Business as usual. 

The only difference was that the West household still had one additional resident.

Nobody was told that Jones was already imprisoned, Ezra included. It didn't feel right, not telling him. Every day, Ezra left the West house early in the morning, and only returned after the sun had set. He would stop in at Jitters around lunch time for an hour or two, but the rest of the time he was like a ghost, disappearing into the backdrop of the city. He never told anybody where he went, but Joe thought he had a pretty good idea.

"Sharp man is still in the city," Ezra told Iris when she asked, two weeks after Jones was given a speedy escort to superpeople prison. He gestured to the TV, where the news was detailing the reported sightings of the killer a few towns over. "Wrong." Iris cleared her throat, raising her eyebrows pointedly. Ezra scoffed. Iris reached over and snatched the bowl of popcorn from his lap, and cleared her throat again. Ezra sighed. "They are wrong," he corrected. Iris smiled and handed the popcorn back to him.

Joe thought it was  _adorable._

"How are they wrong?" Iris asked. "There's been twenty sightings of Jones in Starling City. He's gone, Ezra. He's someone else's problem now."

Ezra shook his head. "He is still in the city," he said again. "Can feel it."

"I think it's a waste of your time."

"Leave him alone, Iris," Joe called from the kitchen. "If he wants to search for Jones, then that's his choice."

Ezra stared at him with a furrowed brow and a small frown. After a moment, he nodded to the detective before turning his attention back to the news, and to fighting off Iris's creeping fingers as she tried to steal the rest of his popcorn.

Nobody was surprised when Ezra was gone again the next morning.

* * *

"Slow down, Ezra. Remember, it's not a race. Think through your words." 

_"Ejas zanero,"_ Ezra grumbled, which was a sentence he said a lot. Iris was pretty sure it meant "I know"; the most stereotypical teenager sentence there was. Brow furrowed, Ezra said, "I do not understand why no one is looking for him. 

Iris sighed.  _Of course_  that was what was on his mind. Almost a month since Jones had vanished, and Ezra still spent all of his time wrapped up in what had become his personal mission. He had to have swept all of Central City twice by now, but that wasn't good enough for him.

"People are, Ezra. Just not here. If he was still in Central City, he would have been found by now." Iris crumpled up the wrapper from her breakfast sandwich and tossed it towards the garbage can. It sailed past, missing by a good two feet. Whatever, she'd clean that up when her break was done. "Don't you think so?" Ezra shook his head. "Of course you don't."

_"Batska-ra_  are still searching," Ezra said. "Very few, but some are." 

That made sense. It would probably still be another couple of weeks until the CCPD officially called off the search. Until then, a skeleton crew would keep looking where there was probably nothing. "So then what's the problem?"

"They are not the ones that should be searching."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Iris asked.

The muscles in Ezra's jaw jumped as he ground his teeth together. He was silent just long enough that Iris knew she wouldn't be getting an answer to her question; just a deflection. _"Batska-ra_  are busy. New people, not  _nastravan-ra,_  but not normal. They have... _touska-ra?"_  He folded his fingers into the rudimentary shape of a pistol.

"Guns?" Iris offered.

Ezra shrugged. "Yes? Like the things  _batska-ra_  carry, but they..." He imitated the firing of a gun.

"Shoot."

"Yes. They shoot cold and fire."

Iris frowned. Why did that sound familiar? She could have sworn she heard her dad and Barry talking about something like that a few months ago, right after Barry woke up from his coma. The gun that "shot cold" sounded familiar, at least; not a gun that shot fire. Unless Ezra just meant a flamethrower, but Iris was pretty sure she would have heard if someone was running around Central City with a normal flamethrower.

"And you're sure they're not warped?"

Ezra nodded his head. "Yes. Very sure."

Well then, that wasn't something she would put on her blog just yet. "Wait." Her eyes narrowed. "How do you know that this stuff is going on?"

Ezra's eyes widened. He stood up from his seat. "Bye, Iris! Enjoy work!" he said as he made a beeline for the front door.

"Ezra, get back here!"

"Sorry!" Ezra called over his shoulder, shoving his way through a crowd of customers that were streaming in for the afternoon rush. _"Ejas ne-sluak eke!_  No speak English!"

And then he was gone.

Iris was going to kill him.

* * *

Ezra was running late.

He didn't actually have a curfew--he wouldn't know what that was, even if he  _did_  have one--but he liked to keep himself to a schedule. He figured that if he turned back up at the West house at the same time every night, Joe would have no reason to send out a search party for him. 

It wasn't a particularly difficult schedule to follow, either. No matter where he was, he would start to head back towards the house when the sun began to set and bleed the sky orange and red. He often took a roundabout path back to the house instead of a direct one, so the moon was typically already well above the roofs of houses by the time he was walking through the front door.

Today was a bit different. The sky was already black and the moon was already overhead. And Ezra still had a while to go before he got back to the West house. 

He knew Central City like the contents of his own backpack, so it wasn't like he had gotten turned around. He hadn't found any signs of Jones, either. Ezra honestly didn't know why he was so behind his self-imposed schedule. There was just...an odd feeling in the air, drifting on the winds between the skyscrapers. He couldn't really put a finger on it. It was trepidation and excitement, fear and intent, curiosity and skepticism. It was the emotions that he tasted in the air on a daily basis, but hiked up to a level that wasn’t typical. 

And all of it led to a big commotion on one of the main streets, the road bookended on both sides by a line of cruisers and a swarm of police officers. 

Ezra blinked. He wasn't an authority in any sense of the word, but he was pretty sure that  _that_  wasn't a normal, everyday occurrence.

He was nosy, and he knew it; owned it, even. So he felt no shame in shoving his way through the crowd of civilians that had gathered where the police couldn't tell them to leave from. From there, he saw a familiar face.

"Eddie!"

The blond detective spun at his name, his eyes raking the crowd until he spotted Ezra. Eddie said something to the other cop at his side--the Captain of the precinct, Ezra was pretty sure--and then jogged over to the cordon line.

"Blue- Ezra, what are you doing here?" Eddie asked, casting looks over his shoulder. "You should be at home."

Ezra pursed his lips, but refrained from commenting. "What is happening?" Ezra asked, pointing towards the gaggle of police officers. "Did you find the Sharp Man?"

Eddie made a face. "What? No. Have you not seen- ...you've not seen the news, because you've been out searching the city. Right." Somewhere back by the police cruisers, a voice called Eddie's name. "I've got work to do, okay? I can't talk right now."

Ezra bobbed his head. "Okay," he said. But when Eddie tried to move away, Ezra slipped between the barriers holding the civilians back, and started towards the cruisers himself. 

"Ezra,  _no._ You can't go over there." Ezra raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "Go home, okay? If you want to talk later, have Joe bring you to the precinct tomorrow." The other eyebrow joined the first. "I can't tell if you were always this stubborn, or if Iris has rubbed off on you."

"Probably both." Ezra suddenly reached forward, grabbed onto Eddie's arms, and jerked him to the side, right in time for a streak of red and a flash of lightning to fly past. 

Eddie swore colorfully, his head snapping around to the area of the street the police had blocked off. "He's here." He turned his attention back to Ezra, but the kid was already gone, jogging towards the line of cruisers as if he had all the right to be there. "Seriously?" Eddie asked.

Nobody else noticed Ezra take a place at the front of the line of cruisers, because everyone's attention was captured by the light show that had erupted on the street. Pillars of fire--both hot and cold--swept around the area, swinging like ineffectual fly swatters at the streak of lightning. That streak stopped on occasion, the electricity and red blur solidifying into the form of a man for just a moment before darting off again.

Things suddenly made a lot more sense. Or, well, maybe not  _a lot,_  but at least a _little_. The streak was  _the Streak._  Or the Flash, apparently, as Iris had told him his name now was. The one good  _nastravan_ Ezra had heard about so far, doing battle with those two weird gun-wielding maniacs that had been bothering the CCPD for the past couple of days.

The Flash was  _right in front of him._  Trying to get the two men to do...something.

"What are they doing?" Ezra asked. It kind of just looked like a really intense game of tag. If the Flash was there to stop the two maniacs, why wasn't he just charging in and punching the living daylights out of them? That would be Ezra's tactic.

"I don't know."

So Eddie wasn't going to be much of a help, then. 

There was someone else that might know, though. If anybody could puzzle out what the Flash was trying to do, it was one of the smartest people Ezra had ever met. He searched the cluster of cops around him, eyes skipping over uniforms as he looked for someone dressed more casually. When he didn't find who he was looking for, he looked back to Eddie. "Where is Barry?"

"What?" Eddie asked. "Barry isn't here."

Ezra frowned. "Yes-"

Eddie cut him off with a swear and a horrified hiss of  _"Oh my god,"_  right before he snatched up a weird-looking shield and charged off down the road. He was just in time to slam the shield down between the Flash and himself, and the beam of blue fire that one of the maniacs unleashed at them. Ezra would have been impressed by Eddie's bravery--or maybe lunacy--but he was preoccupied. 

Eddie might have said that Barry wasn't there, but Ezra was positive that he  _was_. Barry's presence was unmistakable; a bonfire blazing in a snowy field in the dead of night. He was a glowing warmth, a font of crackling energy that nobody else could replicate, even if they tried. He was lightning incarnate, and if Ezra felt him in that street, then he was  _there,_  in that street.

Ezra blinked.

He blinked again.

He looked back at the street, to where the Flash was half burned, half frozen, but the full victor as he and Eddie stood triumphant over the maniac with the cold gun.

That suit.

That  _awful_  suit.

And wrapped up in it, a barely-contained mass of electric energy.

When Eddie returned to the line of cruisers just a few minutes later, Ezra was already long gone.

* * *

Joe was in the middle of helping Caitlin get her car back from the vehicle evidence lot, Cisco hovering around in what was probably a show of support, when the alarm came through on all of their phones. The sudden blaring of klaxons emanating from all of their pockets made them all jump, Joe's hand instinctively jerking towards his firearm. His immediate thought was that the precinct was under attack  _again,_  or that Snart or his pyro friend had made an attempt at an escape.

Cisco recognized the reason first. "Oh. Oh  _shit,"_  he breathed, fishing his phone out of his pocket. The screen flashed with red light, a string of letters and numbers glaring up at him. "Oh, this is bad."

Joe waved off the officer in charge of the evidence lot when she rose from her seat, rolling his eyes and brushing off her concern with, "Dramatic kids. You know the drill." He ushered Caitlin and Cisco away, and the moment enough space was between them and the officer, he growled, "It's been a long day, Cisco, and I don't like that tone. Or this alarm. Why're all of our phones doing that?"

Cisco tapped a code into his phone, and the alarm fell silent, although all the screens continued to flash red. "It's a security system I set up after Eiling was able to just walk into S.T.A.R. Labs. If anything bigger than an alley cat gets into the lab without proper clearance or an escort, it sends an alert to all of our phones." Spotting Caitlin's car a bit farther down the line, he raced towards it, calling over his shoulder, "Someone's broken into the Cortex!"

The drive to S.T.A.R. Labs was heart-stopping. Caitlin had been behind the wheel, driving like they were in a war zone and taking heavy fire. Joe had to wrestle with his sense of duty the entire way across the city, his cop instinct demanding he arrest the doctor right on the spot. He didn't, though, because he would have been driving the same way, had they been closer to his car when at the precinct. Plus he was fairly certain that Caitlin was better at offensive driving than he was.

Cisco had texted Barry on the way there, letting him know why his phone was most likely also wailing. By the time they got to S.T.A.R. Labs, Barry was waiting for them at the elevator in the employee's garage, his face marred with a frown. 

"I cleared the entire building," he said after a quick greeting. "Twice. Nobody's in there." Not even Wells, but he had been spending an increasing amount of time away from the lab anyway, working on a personal project, so that didn't come as much of a surprise.

Caitlin raised both of her eyebrows. "Maybe your program malfunctioned?"

Cisco shook his head, vehement. _"Felicity_  helped me design it," he said. "We based it off of the security system their team uses. She double-checked all of the code. There's no way it malfunctioned." His eyes drifted upwards, towards the security camera wedged in a corner. He snapped his fingers, crying out in triumph, before darting into the elevator and leaving the rest to follow him or get left behind in the garage.

Barry froze when they entered the Cortex barely a minute later, rising up on his toes as his face bled white. He pointed towards his displayed suit, the empty eyes of the mask staring at them all accusingly. "The door was closed when I came through here."

Three pairs of eyes swiveled towards him in alarm. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, Joe. I'm positive."

Cisco slid into one of the chairs at the computers, shaking his head. "Maybe Doctor Wells was here," he thought out loud, false cheer coloring his voice. "That lock on that door is basically impossible to crack if you don't have the code. See, look." He clicked through folders of security footage until he found the most recent save file. "When we watch this, Doctor Wells is just going to roll through. I'm sure he had a reason for leaving the door open. You could have just missed him when you checked in here. Maybe he's in the bathroom. Did you check the bathroom?"

Cisco just kept on babbling as he fast-forwarded through the footage, until a blur of color zipping by the doorway into the Cortex prompted him to pause and rewind, letting the footage play back at a more processable speed.

Barry, however, needed no such handycap, and he was already gaping and whispering, "You've got to be kidding me," by the time Cisco had hit play.

"What was it?" Caitlin asked, her grip tightening on the back of Cisco's chair to the point it looked like her nails were going to puncture the cushion.

Barry didn't have to answer; the footage had that handled.

Onscreen, a slightly blurry Ezra marched past the Cortex's doorway. Even with the bad angle and insufficient lighting, the seething rage on his face was apparent. He walked by the doorway without pausing, but returned not a moment later. He walked into the Cortex and stopped in the middle of the room, the anger creasing his brow slowly fading as he just stood there and breathed, his eyes not focusing on anything in particular. He was fiddling with something in his hands, turning it over and over again, and rolling it between his palms. It looked a bit like a large metal pen, maybe six or seven inches long, but beyond that it was unidentifiable; the security cameras were good, but not  _that_  good.

For a good long while, Ezra didn't move aside from fidgeting with the metal object. Without warning, he spun on his heel and walked right over to the door that hid Barry's suit from the common eye. First he shoved at the door with both hands, and when that didn't work, he threw his shoulder against it. That didn't do anything; those doors could withstand a block of C4 if need be.

Ezra then turned his attention to the electronic lock set into the wall next to the door. He hunched his shoulders as he stood in front of it, blocking most of the camera's view, but left enough visible that it still caught him trying to hack his way into it, if hitting buttons at random could be considered hacking. 

Cisco pointed to the time stamp on the footage. "That's when the alert was sent out."

Ezra continued to try and get through the lock for another few minutes, stopping briefly every once in a while to shove the door again to see if it gave way. It never did.

And then Ezra's spine straightened, his head snapping around to face the doorway, and the hall beyond it. He went eerily still, as if carved from stone. If the time stamp at the bottom of the screen hadn't kept ticking away, they all would have assumed that the footage had frozen.

Ezra suddenly burst into motion. He backed up a good ten feet and then sprinted at the wall. Right before colliding with it, he sprang upwards, pushing off against the door hiding Barry's suit. And then he was gone, vanishing up into the exposed rafters set into the ceiling, where the security cameras couldn't follow.

Not a second later, a blur of lightning shot into the room, circled once, and then exited just as quickly. Two minutes passed in still silence, and then the lightning returned. This time, though, it stopped, leaving Barry standing in the middle of the Cortex, his head on a swivel as he inspected the room again. He focused on the door to his suit a moment longer than anything else, but once he saw it was still firmly closed--and after testing it himself by pushing on it experimentally--he shot out of the room for a final time.

Thirty seconds after his exit, Ezra swung down from the rafters, the metal stick clenched between his teeth. He wasted no time, slinking back to the lock. This time, he fully blocked sight of it with his shoulders, which was  _super unfortunate,_  because not even a minute later, Ezra stood back as the door slid into the wall, granting him access to Barry's suit.

"What?" Cisco barked. "How the hell did he do that?"

"Does that matter?" Caitlin asked, gesturing to the screen as Ezra took one look at the suit, nodded, turned, and fled the Cortex at a sprint. "He saw Barry's suit! He knows!"

"He was in the room when Barry ran in and out of it," Joe said. "And he knew exactly where to look for the suit.  _And_  he didn't look surprised by any of what he saw. Something tells me he already knew."

Barry ground his fists into his eyes, groaning. "Oh, this is bad, isn't it?" he asked. "Nobody else has figured out my identity before." Nobody that had lived to tell about it or hadn't gotten locked up in the Pipeline, anyway. What the hell were they supposed to do with  _this?_  "If he already knew, what was he here for? Confirmation?"

"Way ahead of you," Cisco said, fingers flying across the keyboard like a master pianist at a baby grand. "He already looked mighty pissed before he came in here, and that got me thinking. What do we know pissed Ezra off the most?"

"Cops," Joe deadpanned.

"Medical procedures?" Caitlin offered.

"People that throw away the end slices of a loaf of bread." All eyes again turned towards Barry. "What? He gets, like, irrationally angry about it."

Cisco jabbed the _enter_  key, and held up his hands to the screen as if presenting some glorious prize. "It's  _the Handyman,_  you guys.  _Jesus."_

Sure enough, the screen displayed security footage from inside Jones's cell in the Pipeline. The camera was meant to monitor him, making sure no emergencies arose, but it was placed just far enough from the door to capture Ezra in its sights as well, who stood on the maintenance catwalk just outside of the cell.

The kid looked ready to put his fist through the glass and rip Jones's face off; a feat that would have been impossible, since that "glass" was a polycarbonate that could withstand anything short of a ballistic missile. Jones seemed to realize this as well, and was taking great pleasure in poking fun at Ezra from the other side of the glass. 

The taunts about hunting and killing the homeless were cut off when Ezra appeared to ask Jones a question. Unfortunately, the glass was too thick and the microphone too weak to make out what was said, but Jones didn't appear to have that same problem, because he spun around in his cell once with a huge, giddy grin plastered on his face.

_"Oh yeah, he totally knows. Knows all about you, you freak."_  Ezra grit his teeth, the action visible even on the security footage, as he bit out another short question.  _"Because he saw you. He saw you the night this stupid lab went up in flames. He saw that thing fall into the bay, and he saw you pull yourself out and swim your ass to shore. He knows all about you, and once he can salvage that junk from the bay, everybody else will, too."_  Ezra shook his head in denial, and spoke again.  _"He couldn't before, but he's got new friends now; powerful and connected friends."_  He threw his head back with a deranged cackle.  _"I might be locked up in here, but your days are still numbered, you filthy street freak. How long until you're locked up, too?"_  Jones dropped down onto his cot, grinning whimsically.  _"Compared to what they'll do to you, my digs are the freaking Ritz."_  Ezra slammed his fist into the glass before spinning and storming off, that rage from the Cortex footage darkening his face. 

And all Jones could do was laugh.

* * *

"Ezra?" Joe called, dropping his keys onto the counter in the kitchen. "Ezra, we need to talk!" About what, he still didn't know. Joe had hoped to get his thoughts straight on the drive home, but all he had managed to do was get them even more jumbled. What the hell was he supposed to bring up first? That they had lied to him about Jones still being on the loose, thus making all of his efforts for the past month useless? How S.T.A.R. Labs was acting as a prison for superpowered nutjobs? How Barry was the Flash, the metahuman that Iris had no doubt talked his ear off about, and that  _that_  little tidbit of information had to remain a secret from her? 

Or maybe he would start with whatever Jones had meant; who "He" was, what "He" saw, what had fallen into the bay, who wanted to lock him up and why. There were just so many  _questions,_  and Joe couldn't even begin to fathom an answer to any of them. They had all tried, talking over one another for a good half an hour after rewatching the footage again to try and read Ezra's lips. When that had failed, they went to guessing. The best idea that any of them had was that Ezra really  _was_  a metahuman, but none of them were positive on that; not until they knew for sure that Ezra actually had been in Central City when the particle accelerator exploded. Jones, or "He", or  _whoever_  apparently thought he had been there.

Ezra didn't come running when Joe called. In retrospect, he hadn't been expecting him to. The kid was stubborn at the best of times, almost behaving like a cat; he came when called, but only when he felt like it, or if there was a promise of food. And that was when Ezra felt like being cooperative. If he had felt like listening after everything that had happened over the past few hours, then Joe would have worried that he had gotten sick.

He was probably moping in the guest room. That's what teenagers did; they moped. Joe could faintly remember being like that, once upon a time. He could still remember Barry and Iris being like that.

He rapped his knuckles against the closed door gently, and waited for a response. There was none. 

Joe was just about to open the door himself--it was his house, dammit, and there was no way he was letting the kid avoid a conversation that needed to be had--when the door flew open on its own accord, the handle jerked from his fingers. 

In the doorway stood Iris, her eyes rimmed with red, her brow and jaw set in a firm scowl.

"Iris," Joe said, surprised. "What are you doing home? I thought you worked late tonight?"

_"What did you do?"_  

That wasn't the reaction he had been expecting.

"You're going to have to be more specific."

Iris shook her head, her hair snapping over her shoulders like a whip. "I was at work," she said, "and turned my back on the counter for a  _minute._  And when I turned back around,  _this_  was sitting there." She shoved a napkin, folded over itself twice, into his chest.

He fumbled to catch it when she let go, his stomach already beginning to plummet into his shoes. Still, he unfolded the napkin, revealing words that had clearly been written by an inexperienced and unsure hand.

_Thank you. Goodbye._  

Iris stepped out of the doorway, sweeping her hand across the empty room with the tidy bed and clear nightstands, looking for all the world as if it hadn't been used in months; like they had had a ghost living with them for the entire time.

"Dad,  _what did you do?"_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TWO THINGS.
> 
> ONE: I've uploaded a translation dictionary type...thing...for Galactic Basic! It's in a series with this fanfic, so it should be easy to find, should you want to know what Ezra's saying. Chapter-by-chapter translations, singular word translations, and then a (probably poor) attempt at explaining grammar rules. You don't have to read it if you don't want to, just know that there will never be a translation of Basic at the end of a chapter or anything; it'll all be in the dictionary!
> 
> TWO: I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year, so updates probably won't happen throughout November. Sorry, but I REALLY want to finish this stupid book I've been writing for, like, years.
> 
> Thanks for reading, guys!


	10. "That's it! No more trusting, no more friends!" Or, the One Where Ezra Makes a Friend

For a third time in as many minutes, Ezra cursed the American money system. Whoever invented it, he decided, had clearly been a sadist that hadn't been held enough as a child.

He knew the value of every coin, and knew which name went with which, but he could not for the life of him remember what the conversion rate was. Quarters he could figure out just fine, but how many nickels equaled a dollar again? How many dimes? How many pennies? Iris had taught him a trick involving the definition of "cent", but he couldn't remember what the definition--or the trick--was.

_'Why couldn't it be like wupiupi? At least that makes sense,’_  he thought, pawing through his handful of coins that he was already very familiar with: Three quarters, nine dimes, fourteen nickels, and thirty-seven pennies. _'Or credits. Those have equal-interval values, not this crap._ ’ He had thought that those plastic cards he saw people passing around were similar to the credit chips he knew, but apparently not, because they were somehow just another form of the currency pooled in his palm. 

Instead of counting through the change again with the hope that inspiration would strike and things would suddenly make sense, Ezra returned the money to a plastic bag that he tossed into his backpack. No matter what he had, something told him it wasn't enough to get him much, if it would even get him anything at all.

But with his supply stores running dangerously low, he didn't have many options. Simple jobs, where the supervisors didn't care who he was so long as he could work, were always a possibility, but Ezra knew that those came with their own risks. So did stealing.

_'I could leave Central City again,'_ Ezra thought, pulling his coat tighter against the biting winter winds. _'Try to find someplace warmer.'_ That had been what he had done about eighty days after his explosive arrival. He had left the city behind, both in search of a warmer climate and something that could help him get home. He had only made the return trip when his instincts had demanded that he do so. 

It was those same instincts that revolted at his suggestion of leaving again, demanding like an irate toddler that he stay put. So he would, even if he had no idea why. His brain told him that staying put was dangerous, that it could lead to a whole heck of a lot of bad that he didn't want to deal with, but his instincts had never been wrong before. He had learned to trust them a long time ago.

As he walked down the cold and empty street, long-since abandoned by the people who had a warm place to retreat to for the night, something danced at the edges of his attention. 

If he focused even just a tiny bit, he could feel the waves sent out by every living thing around him, like he was floating in the middle of a vast lake that was somehow both chaotic and serene. Most of the sources of those waves didn't pique his interest as they went about mundane tasks, but one source was more interesting than all of the others. It was actually more like two sources overlapping one another in a way he had never felt before, and in the very center, an unstable heat burned. For just a moment, that heat swelled into something crushing and scorching; an overwhelming force that, had it been tangible and not just a feeling, would have been enough to level buildings. As intangible as it was, it was still enough to sweep over and decimate a different wave source. The lake became just a tiny bit less chaotic.

Ezra was already moving before he realized it, taking off in a dead sprint towards the source of the unstable heat. It was still leveling out again, trying to hide itself beneath the waves when Ezra bodily shoved his way through a pair of glass doors, raced down an empty hall, and slid around a corner into an elevator bay. He immediately ducked, throwing his hands up in a knee-jerk reaction to try and defend against the wall of searing heat and flames that rushed towards him.

He had just a moment to think, _'Shit, this guy's warped,'_ before the maw of fire snapped closed around him.

Ezra reacted in a split second. He reached out with his mind, hurling the command _'Sleep'_ at the _nastravan'fayari_ without really taking the time to aim carefully. Over the roar of the flames, he heard the solid _thunk_ of a body hitting the ground. Only when Ezra felt the searing light and heat vanish did he open his eyes again.

Every surface of the elevator bay was burnt black, the floor dusted with a thick layer of soot that radiated a gentle heat. Between the yawning melted doors of an elevator, laid out as if purposefully displayed, was the charred husk of what had once been a person, its arms brought up in front of its face in a futile attempt to protect itself from the all-consuming fire.

Another person was stretched out on the ground just a few feet from the destroyed elevator, but this one--while dirty and carrying the familiar stench of homelessness--looked nowhere near as bad as the charbroiled corpse. The tile beneath the man had melted together, bubbling and warping to avoid the intense heat that, until a moment ago, had been turning the elevator bay into a massive oven. Ezra didn't even have to check to know that the unharmed man was the _nastravan'fayari._

_"Dobren. Vali ejas kanatha tos?"_ Ezra asked to the room at large. As he wasn't expecting an answer, he jumped three feet in the air when the guy that was _supposed_ to be sleeping groaned in response to his question.

The _nastravan'fayari_ sat up with a long-suffering groan, lifting his hands to rub at his face. He froze halfway through the motion, and just stared at his palms, his eyes wide and uncomprehending. 

_"What?"_  he hissed. His eyes trailed down his arms, down his legs, across the too-big jacket that hung off of his frame like a blanket. "I'm... _what?"_ His gaze drifted over the tops of his fingers, to the curled charcoal that had once been a living human being. The _nastravan'fayari_ scrambled backwards like a flailing crab, scuttling across the floor away from the body. "Shit! _Shit!_ What the hell?!" He slid backwards right into Ezra's shins. His head snapped up, wild eyes locking with Ezra's own bewildered stare, and he immediately changed direction again.  _"What?!"_ He only stopped moving when his back slammed into a wall, although his eyes continued to roll around the room as if they had been shaken loose in their sockets.

Ezra frowned and cocked his head. So long as that blinding fire wasn't making a reappearance, he didn't see the point of getting violent. Yet. He was more confused than anything else. _"Seia,_ why do you not sleep?" Ezra asked the _nastravan'fayari._ "You should not be awake."

_"Awake?"_ the _nastravan'fayari_ repeated, like it was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. "I'm _awake?"_ He froze, his erratic surveillance of the room slowing to a halt. He looked back to his hands again. He flexed his fingers, opening and closing them into fists. His knuckles popped. With each quiet crack, a smile grew on his face. It never got very big, but it was the most relieved expression Ezra had seen in a good long while. "I'm awake," he said again. "I'm _in control."_ His gaze drifted around the room again, calmer this time, ending on the burnt corpse by the melted elevator doors. "What happened?"

"He is dead," Ezra said, as if that wasn't incredibly obvious. "You burned him with your fire."

The man flew to his feet, his eyes wide and wild once again. "No! I wouldn't do that!"

"You are warped, you have the power of fire." 

The _nastravan'fayari_ shook his head, sparks flashing across the knuckles of his fists as he growled through gritted teeth, _"No,_ that wasn't _me._ I wasn't the one in control."

Ezra's eyes narrowed. He reached out with his senses again, and found two sources of waves where there should have only been one; two souls, where only one should exist. Things were making more sense, but only in the _why is this happening_ sense that Ezra had had to adopt after his arrival.

"You are...two?" Ezra asked the man. "Two people, one body? Like a... _diozen?"_

The man jerked as if he had been stabbed, or as if he was getting ready to run. "How do you know that?" he snapped.

Ezra shrugged. "How do you control fire?" he asked. He had meant it to be rhetorical, but the _nastravan'fayari_ didn't seem to realize that.

"I don't control it. _We_ don't control it. We _can't_ control it."

That seemed like quitter talk to him. Ezra's brow furrowed as he concentrated and inspected the barely-contained mass of heat that swirled at the center of the _nastravan'fayari._ It certainly seemed out of control, but not in any way that even approached intentional. It felt almost like a child that acted based on instinct and emotion, lashing out without understanding the consequences. The tight grip of fear had the _nastravan'fayar_ i in its clutches; had dug its claws into him--or them--and refused to let go. And with every inch deeper those claws reached, the more the heat lashed out in defense.

So Ezra broadcast feelings of serenity and stability, setting them down by the unstable heat like he was trying to coax a wild animal out of hiding. _'There's no need to be afraid,'_ they said. _'Be at peace.'_

As the fear was brushed away by the serenity, the raging heat dwindled to a simmer, ready to leap up again in defense, but only if it was actually called upon.

The shaking in the man's hands quieted. His cheeks no longer looked quite as flushed, but were instead a pale shade that spoke of spending many months hidden away where the sun--and people--couldn't find him. The exhaustion that pinched his brow remained, but even that seemed to smooth out into something less desperate than it had been before.

"What just...?" The high-pitched whine of sirens echoed into the elevator bay, and a new arrival lit up at the edges of his perception, sending out the chaotic waves of something big and fast. The _nastravan'fayari_ tensed, a look of terror spreading across his face as his eyes darted back to the charred corpse. "I can't be here," he whispered. "I can't go to prison! If I go there, and I _lose control--"_

"Prison? That is...with bars?" Ezra asked. "Where criminals go after capture?" The _nastravan'fayari_ nodded. "Then do not go there. Run instead. Learn control."

"You say that like it's easy."

Ezra shrugged. "Focus. Practice. It becomes easy, with time." 

The man's hands curled into fists, the muscle in his jaw coiling. For just a moment, the heat stirred again, rising and settling almost too quickly for Ezra to sense it. "I don't have time," the _nastravan'fayari_ said. "I- We- _The other one_ has been trying to control this _for a year."_ He waved a hand at the charred body. "It's gotten us nowhere!"

Ezra breathed in deeply, held the breath until his chest ached, and then released it slowly. _'It's not a good idea,'_ one half of him whispered to the other. _'His problems aren't yours. Remember what happened last time you forgot that? You should. It was only ten days ago.'_

But this man was different than the others: He was _warped._ He had just as much to lose as Ezra did if he trusted the wrong people. If anybody could even come _close_ to understanding the panic and distrust that had dominated Ezra's life for the past long while--his whole life, really--then it was this man.

"I can teach you."

The _nastravan'fayari_ looked skeptical. "You can?" Ezra nodded. The _nastravan'fayari_ chuckled, the sound flat and humorless. "Sure. Why not? Not like this can get any worse."

Ezra disagreed: Things could get a lot worse. Especially if they kept sitting there, waiting for the police to show up. He gestured for the other man to follow him. "Come, Diozen! We must run!" He felt rather than saw two officers approaching, their hurried jogging kicking up tall, choppy waves. "We must run very fast!"

* * *

"Wake up," Ezra demanded, kicking at the corner of the ratty blanket until it flopped with a wet slap across the man's face. "Diozen, wake up." 

The man--whichever man it was today--growled and swatted at Ezra's boot with one hand, the other coming up to wipe away the runoff-soaked blanket. He glared up at Ezra with bloodshot eyes. "I'm exhausted," he said. "Leave me be."

Kind of crotchety, a certain cadence when speaking that sounded unnatural in the man's mouth: Stein it was, then.

"You have been sleeping for two days. I will not."

"My _mind_ was sleeping, this _body_ was not," Stein protested. "You and Ronald saw fit to put it through the wringer."

"You wanted control," Ezra said with an unapologetic shrug. "Did you think it would be easy?"

"If you recall, I wasn't present for that conversation."

"You were there. You were just not awake." Ezra kicked the blanket again and said over Stein's indignant sputtering, "Get up, Diozen! You must leave here. Now!"

That got the _nastravan'fayari_ moving: He sat up, his hand automatically reaching for where his meager pack of possessions had been wedged between his side and the wall of the underpass. "Why?" he asked. "Police?"

Ezra offered a hand and pulled Stein to his feet, and jerked his head in an indication to follow him. "Worse," he said. 

"Worse than the police finally locating me?" Stein scoffed. "Worse than me being incarcerated, where a lapse of my poor control would result in more death?"

"Yes," Ezra said. He led Stein over to the chain link fence that had been installed to prevent the homeless from congregating between the underpass and the on-ramp, but had been sliced through a long time ago. The two slipped through the gap and continued on, hugging the wall of the on-ramp until they reached the spillway, mostly empty now aside from the scattered piles of slush and the larger patches of ice that had yet to melt; the weather was still too cold for that, although it was thankfully growing warmer again. "The S.T.A.R. people want you. You must not go back to your spot."

"Star people?" Stein repeated, tone flat. He didn't sound as worried as he should have been, which Ezra could understand. He didn't make a habit of socializing with  _nastravan-ra_ he occasionally ran into, but those that he did all lacked an awareness of the danger that awaited them in the shattered building. Those that didn't set off his instincts were warned away from them; to those that _did,_ he said nothing at all. "And they are?"

"They know how to stop _nastravan_ powers. They capture _nastravan-ra_ and do not let them go."

"Perhaps that is for the best."

"They will capture _you_ and not let you go."

Stein paused. "Perhaps that is for the best."

Ezra reached out, probably rougher than necessary, and quashed the restless fire that he felt rising in response to Stein's distress. The lines in Stein's forehead smoothed out, but his gaze was still uncertain. _"Ine, eke nerkas!_ It is not! You did not choose to hurt! The fire did."

"And yet you insist that that very fire is a part of me." Stein frowned. "Us," he amended.

"You do not listen, Diozen. You are you. The fire is the fire. You are just connected.  _Na Ashila metri zir_. Control the connection, you control the fire. Do not, and the fire does as it thinks it should. You provide the focus."

"Fire that thinks?" Stein shook his head. "That's not very scientific."

Ezra shrugged. "Maybe with _your_ science."

"...you are a very odd child."

Ezra grinned. "Thank you."

The two walked in silence. When the spillway began to slope upward as they neared the bay, they climbed back up to street level and took to the allies. Five times Ezra stiffened and shoved Stein behind a dumpster or into doorways, each time with just seconds to spare before a police cruiser rolled by their hiding place; after two months of seeing one another almost every day, Stein had learned to not ask how Ezra _always knew._

They stuck to the buildings closest to the shoreline, the salt in the air coating their tongues and making Ezra's nose itch. They circled the bay, which took close to two hours because of Ezra's paranoia that every police cruiser might contain those he wanted to avoid. 

The last leg of their journey was arguably the most difficult, and the most obnoxious. The shipyard Ezra had picked out as a training ground of sorts wasn't highly trafficked, seeing as it was filled with rusted, gutted ships that had been marked for death and were awaiting destruction. Some of the ships had been there for decades and had surrendered to the elements, great pieces of them growing brittle in the salty wind and breaking away to fill the unforgiving shallow waters with sharp, metallic icebergs that lurked beneath the waves; the piers between the decaying ships were no safer. Aside from the danger of a collapsing ship dumping debris on their heads without warning, the shipyard was patrolled by a number of guards that searched for thieves looking to strip the newer ships of anything valuable, or for homeless people that would rather face getting crushed by metal than face the cold of another night on the streets. 

Farthest away from the yard office and the highly patrolled areas was an old quay that had been all but abandoned after an earthquake had rolled the ship there up onto the shore; removing it and repairing the damages would have cost more than the shipyard would make from dismantling it. So the cruise liner had remained there, a monolithic metal skeleton with its rusted rib cage bared to the sky and anything it saw fit to drop on the half-pulled apart ship. 

It was there that Ezra had stayed true to his word of teaching the _nastravan'fayari_ how to control their fire. The cruise liner's hull might have been rusted and missing a few pieces, but those that remained were still sturdy enough to contain the fire when it got  too out of hand. The tables that hadn't yet been unbolted from the floor in the dining hall were repurposed into targets; bulls eyes were carved into the tops for aiming practice, while Ezra used the legs as projectiles to teach the _nastravan'fayari_ how to adapt to and defend against multiple opponents. The exposed frames of the hull became obstacles to weave between during flight practice--Ezra envied them because of that particular ability. 

The ballroom, though, located at the center of the old cruise liner, was the room that faced the most abuse: It was the only place where the _nastravan'fayari_ could release the death grip he had on the fire. 

"You are afraid," Ezra had said the day he had brought the _nastrvan'fayari_ to the shipyard.

"Of course I'm afraid," the man had responded with a breathy chuckle. "I'm freaking terrified!"

"Fear is not good. It brings bad things. It feeds the fire; makes _it_ afraid, makes _it_ lash out."

"So then what am I supposed to do?"

Ezra had shrugged. "Let go."

"Like it's that easy."

"No, Diozen, not _easy._ It is never easy. But it becomes more easy with--"

"Practice. Focus. Yeah, you keep saying that." The man had paused, looking around the tilted room, at the faded and cracked floor, at the walls stained from years of water damage, at the curtains Ezra had pulled down from the windows and tossed in a pile in the corner. "What if the fear is all that's keeping it in check?" He had then asked. "What if I stop being afraid of it, and it just..." He had mimed an explosion with his hands. 

"You fear the fire," Ezra had said. "Your fear turns to... _apofnuvan?_ You run from it. You do not control what you do not face." 

"You just _don't get it,"_ the man had said. "I feel it all the time, burning and boiling inside my chest, trying to get out. My fear--of it, of what could _happen_ \--is the only thing that's keeping me from slipping."

Ezra had cast around the room then; thirty seconds, forty-five, a minute passed in silence. And then he had knelt to the floor and held out his hand, and a rat easily the size of his forearm had scurried out from a hole in the wall and darted towards him. The _nastravan'fayari_ had leapt away with a disgusted shout, but Ezra had simply waited for the rat to run up to his hand, sniff his outstretched palm, and then sit back on its haunches.

Ezra had smiled and pat the rat's head with his finger; it hadn't bitten him, nor shied away from his touch. "I could not connect well when my _kyrinalos_ had me try on a _lothmao._  So he took me to practice with _fyrnock-ra_ \--um, big animals, can rip apart an adult in a moment. And I was very afraid, of many things: The _fyrnock-ra,_ failing, dying, _na Ashila_...but my _kyrinalos_ told me to let go of the fear. It was not easy, is still not. But I understand now that you cannot control what you fear." The rat had suddenly risen up then, and began to dance an uncoordinated jig, nearly tripping over its tail as it dipped an imaginary partner. 

"What the _hell?"_  Ezra had laughed, and with a wave of his hand, the rat had turned and skittered back into the wall. "How did you do that?"

"It is what _I_ control-- _my_ fire," Ezra had said. "Fear is a barrier. But it is there because you put it there. Face it, let it go, and you will see the barrier is gone. Then you can learn control."

It hadn't been easy, but both halves of the _nastravan'fayari_  eventually learned how to quell their fear enough that violent explosions of force and fire weren't a constant threat; the old cruise liner became less of a method of containment, and more of a place for the _nastravan'fayari_ to hone his skills, and a place for both he and Ezra to retreat to when in need.

Ezra considered hiding from both law enforcement and S.T.A.R. Labs as _being in a whole heck of a lot of need._

Ezra brought Stein to one of the guest rooms that had intact walls and a bed frame bolted down; a pile of threadbare blankets and holey curtains replaced the mattress that had once been there. Uneven boards of wood had been secured across the broken window to keep the wind--and prying eyes--out, and keep the warmth in. Stein didn't look impressed, but that was kind of his default facial expression, so Ezra wasn't offended.

"You will stay here, for now," Ezra said, motioning to the room. "Until the S.T.A.R. people do not want you, or until we can find you a better place."

"It'll do," Stein sniffed, slipping his duffel bag from his shoulder and dropping it at the foot of the bed. "I find it unwise to stay in a place where explosions happen regularly, however. If these star people know that I'm warped, it'll be like hanging a flashing neon sign for them."

"If I had more room, you would be staying with me," Ezra said. He shrugged. "It is temporary. The S.T.A.R. people will lose interest, in time."

Stein raised an eyebrow. "Will they?"

_"Ma,_ probably," Ezra said. "If they do not, I will distract them." 

Stein affixed Ezra with a concerned gaze--one of the few the man had ever gifted Ezra with. "They're after you as well?" he asked.

"For a different reason. But yes."

"No. I can't ask you to do that for me. For us. Ronald would agree, I'm sure."

"It is my decision, Diozen. And there is no danger--they will only catch me if I allow it." Ezra grinned, and Stein cracked a small smile of his own that he quickly smothered with a disapproving frown. But he said no more on the subject, mostly because he knew Ezra's stubborn streak was even more impressive than is own. "Do not leave unless at night. Do not visit your wife. She is not in danger, but I think they know. I will check on her for you."

Stein nodded, grateful. "Thank you."

"Also, no flying." 

Stein paused. "Ronald would like to know if you are revoking TV privileges as well." He chuckled. "I actually find that one amusing."

Ezra's eyes narrowed. "You will meditate for double the time."

Stein sputtered. "You can't punish me. I'm the _adult!"_

"And I am the _nastranalos,"_ Ezra responded. He laughed at the joke only he understood. "Six hours."

"That's _triple."_

"Yes."

* * *

Ezra flattened himself on top of the knoll, the binoculars he had _procured_ from one of the larger chain stores clutched tightly in his hand. He peered through them, past the tall wrought iron fence and to the warehouse perched at the end of a wide cement pier, all of it encrusted in a fine layer of salt that gave everything an almost chalky appearance. It was dark, even for his eyes, and the amount of lighting surrounding the warehouse was abysmal at best, which was why the amount of people milling around its perimeter and filing in and out of it just screamed "We're doing something illegal in here!"

Ezra counted the guards, and then reached out quickly to double-check that count; five, not including the one that had fallen asleep near the front gate. _'That's manageable,'_ Ezra thought as he tucked all of his senses up inside of his head again, leaving just the bare minimum out; who knew who could be around with the ability to sense his presence if he kept broadcasting it? _'I've gotten past more guards in my sleep.'_

He reached the fence at a sprint and launched over it, sailing silently over the yard between it and the warehouse to land on a walkway that wrapped around the second story of the old building. The metal underfoot creaked, and he froze with a wince. He waited for shouts of alarm or the firing of guns, but none came; all he heard was hushed conversation or the occasional order, and the lap of waves against the walls of the pier. He relaxed with a sigh.

Ezra crept along the walkway, until he found a window already propped open, which he carefully lifted up just enough to wriggle through. The walkway inside the warehouse rattled even louder than the one outside, shaking loose a half-folded tarp that had been slung across the railings. It fell to the floor below with a solid _whup._

"What the hell was that? Johnny, that you droppin' crap? You drunk again?"

Ezra cursed under his breath as a balding man with biceps bigger than his skull rounded one of the boats stored in the main hangar, bushy brows lowered over beady eyes. Ezra flicked his wrist. Two metal prongs, curving outwards from a central point to form a vague semicircle, popped up from the leather bracer encircling his left wrist. A thin line of jittery yellow energy crackled to life between the ends of the two prongs, which Ezra grabbed onto and pulled back. The man had just enough time to stare uncomprehendingly at the fallen tarp, and track it up to where it had fallen from, before Ezra released the line. A bolt of energy snapped from the line, zipping through the air with a hiss and colliding with the man's chest; a reflexive gasp left him as he collapsed to the dirty warehouse floor, out like a light.

Ezra huffed a breath. _'Knocking him out. Subtle, Ezra. Real subtle. Now he'll know something's going on!'_ He flicked his wrist again, and the prongs snapped back down to lay flush against the leather brace. _'...when he wakes up. Gotta work fast, I guess.'_

He circled the walkway, making his way quickly to the enclosed office at the back of the warehouse. He sighed with relief when the doorknob turned freely and the door swung open without a sound. Staying low to avoid the windows, he shuffled over to the cluttered desk, the lamp perched on one corner the only source of light in the dark room. A man was reclined in the chair, his feet kicked up on the desktop and his hands crossed on top of his large belly, and his snoring loud enough to give hearing damage to a foghorn. Once Ezra was close enough, he peered at the man's face.

Not the man he was looking for. Drat.

But that wasn't what he had come to the warehouse for, anyway, so he wasn't that disappointed. Instead, he shifted his focus to the spread of papers laid out on the desk. He craned his neck to try and get a better view of them, and squinted his eyes to try and get the characters to stop swimming around the pages. He didn't try and puzzle out every single word; he was only looking for a few in particular.

He had just spotted it when the communicator embedded in the leather of his bracer crackled to life and began to chirrup. 

The man startled awake with a grunt. His confused eyes locked with Ezra's startled ones. He frowned. His mouth opened wide. "INTRUDER--"

Ezra delivered a swift punch to the man's face, his nose shattering beneath his knuckles. The man tipped in the chair, and both he and it toppled backwards into the filing cabinets behind them, which he cracked his head against; the sound it made was even louder than his snoring had been. He hit the floor and groaned, but didn't move to rise to his feet, or grab at the gun belted to his thick waist.

Ezra wasted no time shuffling through the papers, plucking out the one that he had wanted and stuffing it into the pocket of his jacket. He turned on his heels and sprinted towards the office door. 

Out on the walkway, two guards drawn by the crash and beginnings of a shout barreled towards him, weapons drawn. But Ezra was faster, _much_ faster than they were; he flicked his wrist, launched a yellow bolt at the man on the left, and then used the face of the one on the right as a springboard to hurl himself up and out of one of the open exterior windows. He pushed off of the outside balcony's railing, streaking through the night sky as the floodlights surrounding the warehouse lit the area in a dazzling white glow. He hit the ground just outside the wrought iron fence and rolled off of his shoulder, popping up to continue his flight away from the cement pier. Behind him, he heard shouts and the issuing of orders, and the sharp _pop_ of a gun being fired--once, twice, thrice; either all of the bullets missed, or getting shot by a gun hurt less than Ezra had thought it would.

He didn't slow his sprint until he had crossed two jogging paths and three empty parking lots; only then did he turn his attention to his leather bracer, which still beeped for his attention. 

_'If it's just another meteor...'_ Ezra thought, bringing his arm up towards his face. He clicked a button near the folded-down prongs of the energy slingshot. _"Vali, Vosqlran?"_ he snapped. _"Ejas zafali!"_

A moment of silence, and then a tentative, _"Ezra?"_ crackled up from the bracer. Ezra stumbled, but regained his footing.

"Diozen?" he asked. "How did you contact me like this?"

_"I'm at your place,"_ the voice said, wavering with panic and a tinge of embarrassment; it was probably Ronnie at the controls, then. That rarely happened without Ezra's help. _"I'm sorry, I didn't know where else to go, and I-- I needed to get ahold of you, but I didn't know_ how, _and then this thing just showed up-- If Stein was awake he'd be_ losing his mind-- _Ezra, what_ is _this thing?"_

"Do not worry about it right now," Ezra instructed. "Focus. What is wrong?"

_"They found me,"_ Ronnie said. _"I don't know how, but I was asleep, and Stein suddenly switched and all I could feel was the need to_ run, _and I--"_ Ronnie inhaled deeply, five times, slowing his breathing the way Ezra had showed him. _"I think the star people found us."_

"Were you followed?" Ezra asked.

_"No,"_ Ronnie responded. _"I flew across the bay and landed on the other side of the city, and made my way here on foot. I mostly kept to the sewer tunnels. They couldn't have tracked me."_

Ezra turned in the direction of the poorer end of town. "Change your clothes. I have ones that will fit you. And cut your hair, or find a hat. Then meet me outside that building where we met."

_"Okay, but...why?"_

"The S.T.A.R. people are smart. They must have found a way to track you. They could not have found you otherwise."

_"Shit! I shouldn't have come here. If I lead them to your_ home--"

"If you had, they would be there by now," Ezra said. "But staying in one place too long is dangerous. Move quickly, disguise yourself, then meet me."

_"Then what?"_ Ronnie asked.

"Then we run."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO SORRY this took so long to get to you guys! I'm what the kids would call "a hot mess". This chapter just DID NOT want to get written. I was stuck on the introduction of Ezra to Firestorm for literally this entire time, I shit you not. But I hope this chapter was worth the wait! Things are going to quickly start falling apart for Ezra from here (and then get better...and then get a LOT worse), so I hope you guys are all as excited as I am! Y'all ready for Ezra to start playing fast and loose with his Force abilities? Because I sure am. Hopefully the next chapter won't take five freaking months.
> 
> The translation guide/dictionary/whatever has been updated to include all Basic words/sentences used in this chapter, if you guys want to check that out.
> 
> Please leave a comment if you can! I love hearing from all of you!


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